


Wires

by pragma (CarlileLovesAnime)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cancer, High School, Jearmin Week, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-03 07:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1067858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarlileLovesAnime/pseuds/pragma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jean finds a willing partner for the AP computer science project he dreads. And ends up getting so much more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teamwork

**Author's Note:**

> wow what do i say 
> 
> i'm doing the jearmin week thing because this ship is downright presh. if you're wondering what that is, here is the tumblr post about it: http://painbows.tumblr.com/post/66903050318/jearmin-week-december-2nd-8th-prompts-dec-2  
> so yeah i will do what i can to post a chapter a day of this. the first chapter is on today's prompt, uh, teamwork. 
> 
> also you might be able to tell i actually know diddly about software programming/computer science. 
> 
> tumblr user ascensionablaze has been my go-to beta reader the last few months and for that i am thankful because she is brilliant. if you haven't read her jeanmarco fic "the art of cutting cookies" i suggest you do because her jean characterization is perf and totally had some influence on the way i wrote him in this. coughs.

“Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” _Mattie Stepanek_  


***

Jean Kirchstein forgot his coffee this morning.

He does not think himself high maintenance – rather, he just finds everything easier when he has a kick start. Today is not going to be an easy day, though. This he can tell already. Having AP computer science for first period is suffering.

He swings into an entirely different position in his chair, trying his level best to not roll his head over the back, sprawl his limbs, shut his eyes and forget he’s even here. The earbud falls out of his left ear. He forces a grunt and shimmies his hand around the space where he thinks it’s landed.

Ms. Zoe strides into the room no more than two seconds after the bell rings, as per her usual fashion. “Good morning, everyone,” she sings. “Happy Monday.”

 _Kill me, Lord_ , Jean thinks. He pulls out the other earbud, bundles the cord in his lap, and scoots his chair forward so that his legs are under the table. The unclaimed computer beside him buzzes.

Ms. Zoe plops her enormous 3-ring binder onto her desk. She stands at the front of the room and claps her hands together, and the din of conversation all but ceases.

“Have I got an exciting new project to assign you kids,” she announces, grinning.

Jean angles his head toward the ceiling. _Any time now_. He frowns and tries to remember how long that orange pencil has been stuck in the tile in the corner.

The teacher turns, opens her binder, grabs a large pile of packets – packets, man, if only the line at the _fucking Starbucks_ had not been so long today – and begins to circle the room to hand one to each student.

“This, my students, is what most would consider a college-level assignment – but, we are in a college-level course, so I don’t think it should be too much for you lovely geniuses of mine to handle,” she says. She slaps a stack of papers onto Jean’s keyboard, and he only looks down at it with gritted teeth.

One hand shoots up, and without even being called, the student speaks: “How tough is it?”

“Just hear me out.” Ms. Zoe finishes handing out the papers and then returns to the front of her desk. From there she counts students, craning her neck to see over the monitors, wiggling her finger in the air and mouthing the numbers. “Good. There’s an even amount of you.”

She takes a deep breath and starts to talk again, her voice level rising. “All of you have heard of SHSSC, I trust? The district competition is in three weeks. Participation in it is not required for this project, but I do recommend it – I might even offer bonus points.”

They are going to program a robot, Ms. Zoe explains. Each participant will receive a small automaton and write a code that will make it perform a series of movements. There are already guidelines for possible motions, though students can code for others with permission. Using notes is allowed but copying codes from previous assignments is not.

And students must work in pairs.

When Jean hears this, he suddenly feels awake. He throws a couple looks around the room and his arm aches as he raises his hand. Ms. Zoe gestures at him.

“Can we work alone on this?” he asks.

She visibly stops herself from saying something, and shakes her head from side to side. He glances at the rubric in front of him. **STUDENTS MUST WORK IN PAIRS.** On the front page. Bolded. Capslocked.

As if this morning could not suck any more. A stabbing pain rushes to his neck, and he rubs at it sorely and hates himself for the thousandth – millionth – billionth time for not taking this course last year with his only friend.

At last, Ms. Zoe spreads her arms and smiles, the beginnings of crow’s feet crinkling behind her Coke bottle glasses. “I am giving you all a lot of freedom on this assignment. I’m sure you won’t disappoint me.”

_Did you hear me earlier, Lord? I’m not normally a praying man but I’m not patient either._

“Now, grab a partner and be sure to see me if you have questions.”

 _Fucking smite me_.

The two girls who always sit to his left simply pick up their conversation from where it ended when Ms. Zoe entered the room. Jean sinks in his chair. He’s not even going to ask – they’ll work together for sure. He may as well not even make any effort at all.

He anchors his heels on the blue Berber carpet, pushes his chair backward a few inches, and eases his forehead onto the edge of the table. The top of his head pushes on the spacebar. Seconds later, the computer pings. He decides to stop caring outright, and closes his eyes.

“Are you okay?” The voice sounds unfamiliar but still soothing, like sticking muddy hands under a warm running tap and watching and feeling the grime slough off of the skin.

Jean lets out a deep sigh. “Sure,” he says, lifting his head. His eyes open to the person filling the normally empty seat to his right.

He recognizes the guy, actually. He has seen him every school day since the last week of August – yet doesn’t remember his name, how pathetic, the class has only 17 other goddamn people in it and Jean’s managed to meet only two in the last, what, six months? If Jean’s memory serves him in any other way, the guy usually associates himself with the pretty Asian girl and that one lanky loud dude.

Jean clicks his tongue at the sight of him, without thinking.

The guy grimaces for a fraction of a second, and then smiles. “Do you want to be partners?” he asks.

Air rushes into Jean’s lungs and his shoulders straighten and he says “sure” again, his voice filling with energy out of nowhere. Only after he processes this for a few more seconds does he realize what’s really going on. His guess is Asian Girl and Loud Dude kicked him – Blond Kid, Jean can call him for now – out of the trio for the project, and with nowhere else to go, Blond Kid stumbled upon him.

(And Jean would like to be offended that Blond Kid just assumed he was unpaired, but that would involve pretending he is anything but a stranger to everyone else in the room.)

Blond Kid’s smile widens. “Great.” He turns a bit to face his computer, reaches forward and clicks on the monitor with his short, slender fingers. “I already have a rough idea in my head,” he says, “But, of course, if you have anything, I’m more than willing to go with what you’ve got.”

He hunches over the keyboard and Jean stares blankly the screen while Blond Kid types in his username and password: ada110396, 13 characters. The window disappears and the screen flashes a few times before reaching the desktop.

Blond Kid clicks onto Word; Jean gazes at the blinking line at the top of the document. The kid squirms once in his seat and then faces Jean, his features taut with concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” Jean blurts. He leans back, shuts his eyes and rubs his temples with the tips of his fingers. “I’m just. Tired. I’m fine.” His eyes open again and his fingers ease to a stop. “I’m sorry,” he adds with a sigh.

The kid holds up his palms. “Oh, no, that’s alright! I’m tired too.” He faces the monitor. “I stayed up later than I should have last night,” he chuckles.

Jean lifts his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything in response, doesn’t think the kid even notices.

Blond Kid meshes his fingers together, turns his hands inside-out and cracks his knuckles with successive pops.

“Alright, then, Jean,” he says, “Let’s get started.”

At this Jean’s stomach feels as though it has just collapsed in on itself – his scalp feels hot and sweaty underneath his hair. _Shit_. He squints at the kid’s packet, which lies on the desk on the opposite side of his keyboard. His name is written in loopy, girlish letters in the top corner of the front page, but a blue, eraserless mechanical pencil covers half of them, and the other half he can’t make out from this angle anyway. Jean’s cheeks grow hot. _Still not too late, Lord_.

He opens his mouth, inhales, and spills forth the question like he’s ripping off a bandaid. The name is Armin. And he’s not mad in the least. And, at the end of the period, Jean learns his email address, too. 


	2. Travel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow ok i am still doing the jearmin week thing yes 
> 
> beta-reading credits to tumblr users ascensionablaze and mirthinmywindow/earthinmywindow

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” _St. Augustine of Hippo_

***

Jean Kirchstein, at this time tomorrow, will have no more friends in this town.

“I hate packing,” Jean gripes. He adjusts the iPhone against his ear. “It’s so tedious.”

Marco’s laugh comes through tinny from the other end of the line. “I’m already finished, pretty much. The only things that aren’t in my suitcase are just one set of clothes and some basic toiletries. The house is totally empty. Feels so strange.”

“Don’t talk about that,” Jean snarls. He scrunches his nose as if Marco can see him. “No more moving talk.” Please no more moving talk.

Marco just laughs again. “Now, Jean, it’s not going to be that bad. I’ll still come over during the summer, and we can always call and text and Skype until then.”

The divorce has been so nasty, everyone is surprised that Marco’s father would even consider taking his kids for any amount of time.

“Besides,” Marco teases, “Just because you deny it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” Jean frowns and Marco adds, “Gosh, I’m sounding like you.”

“I don’t like that, either,” Jean quips. “I get enough of me as it is.” Marco sure is in the mood for laughing tonight.

Jean rumples his shirt into his gaping suitcase, having given up on folding it with one hand. He pivots and purses his lips at the dry-cleaned slacks and dress shirt (the latter borrowed from his dad) hanging over the top of his closet door. He sighs. He should be excited, proud, giddy. Instead, he’s just upset.

***

The brutal sentence of being in the school’s front parking lot by 6:30 in the morning, sweet Jesus, is not quite something Jean was looking forward to either. He sails into the space between parallel white lines and decides he doesn’t care that he’s parked crooked. The first thing he does when he opens the door is dump the rest of his now tepid grande-sized Caffe Americano into the grass so that his car won’t stink when he returns on Tuesday.

Ms. Zoe trots over to him. She looks rather different – maybe it’s that she actually washed her hair for once.

“Good to see ya,” she says. “Thanks for coming out so bright and early.”

He turns the keys out of the ignition, flings the empty coffee cup onto the floor in front of the passenger’s seat, and steps out. She meets him at the trunk to help pull out his bags. They shove them into the back of the district car, and then he scans the interior of his Mazda one last time before closing and locking all the doors.

She grins at him. “I don’t know about you, but I’m _so_ excited.”

Armin and Jean are the first students in three years she’s had advance to the statewide level of the competition. It’s a two-and-a-half hour drive from here to the capital. Jean has every right to anticipate boredom, stuck in the district car – a gray mid-2000s sedan with decals on both back doors – with Ms. Zoe. He’s not even sure she can drive well.

She asks if he slept well. He half-shrugs and says, “About five hours.” Cumulatively speaking, he supposes that’s true. She shakes her head.

At this a black Volvo pulls into the lot, idling beside the curb. The front passenger door swings open and out scurries Armin, who seems, from afar, mostly calm. He waves at Ms. Zoe and Jean (they wave back), rounds the back of the car and struggles to yank a duffle bag off the bench backseat. Jean and Ms. Zoe start to head toward him.

The driver’s window rolls down – Asian Girl is at the wheel. She leans her head out the window a bit. “Need any help?” she asks her friend.

“I’ve got it,” Armin insists. With a final grunt he pulls the bag out of the car and, carrying it by the handle with both elbows locked in front of him, hobbles over to the open trunk of the sedan. Ms. Zoe makes a gesture as if she wants to help, but Armin shakes his head and quietly repeats, “I’ve got it.” Jean watches him, wondering whether the guy overpacked or just has no arm strength.

The entire car bounces as he pushes the bag into the back. He glances over the cargo before easing the lid shut.

“Have a good time,” Asian Girl calls. She flashes them a thumb-up. “Beat the hell out of ‘em.”

“Thank you so much for the ride!” Armin yells.

The girl nods, rolls up the window, and drives off.

Jean and Ms. Zoe return to where Armin is standing. “Sorry I’m late,” Armin begins. “It was such a fiasco—”

“You’re perfectly fine,” Ms. Zoe replies. He chuckles and she claps him on the back. She starts toward the front seat. “Let’s roll.”

Armin, behind Ms. Zoe (since he doesn’t need as much leg room), leans forward to check over the automaton strapped into the front passenger’s seat. As soon as Jean plops onto the other end of the bench, he realizes he forgot to text his mom. He pulls out his phone and taps out a short message. Normally he’s not one for txt-speak, but nothing about today is normal.

***

Before meeting Armin, Jean could never say he had a pleasant group-work experience. The kid has been a dream.

One night not too long before the due date, the two of them were sitting at the local public library. They looked – and felt – like wrecks, running on respective caffeine vices and sheer force of will to get the damn thing done. Armin had his eyes fixed on the screen of his cheap old laptop for hours, plugging away at the trickiest part of the code, while Jean made final but crucial adjustments to the robot itself.

Jean doesn’t know why, but that particular scene comes to his mind now as he stands in the corner of the hotel lobby, watching everyone ignore him. He thinks on it, and a warmth settles in his chest.

Armin is easily the smartest and most hardworking person Jean has ever met. He never wasted time when they convened to work on the project. No word in an email, text message or phone call was ever used in vain. The guy has significantly less bullshit about him than at least 90% of the people Jean associates with – and there are few things Jean can appreciate more than lack of bullshit.

He feels close to Armin. Closer than he is to almost anyone else.

And he feels pathetic admitting this, because in this moment, he realizes he knows very, very little about him.

Jean’s not the most sociable person: he almost always feels abrasive and out-of-place when speaking with others, does not care for social cues or small talk or mindless pleasantries in general, and takes a long time to trust people. Maybe that is why Marco – optimistic, outgoing, empathetic, earnest Marco – is the only person who’s put up with Jean long enough to be called his friend. Jean doesn’t even think himself fond of most of the people he’s known since childhood. Marco Bodt could make friends with a cardboard box.

Armin, Jean observes, can play the room surprisingly well. He’s articulate, genuine, relatable. Able to play politics. Jean squints at the jovial Armin from halfway across the room and wonders what he, Ms. Zoe and the other teacher with them could be talking about – not that it’s his business, of course, but it’s just that he hasn’t really seen Armin act this enthusiastic before.

The boy gesticulates and says something that makes the adults laugh, and pulls away from them with a smile. He takes a few steps into the thicker part of the crowd and lifts onto his tiptoes to get a better angle as he skims the room. His smile fades instantly. He’s notably short in stature compared to almost everyone else here.

He locks eyes with Jean and smiles again, and Jean blinks and stirs and waits for Armin to make his way over to where he is, disappearing among the taller people and then reappearing once he is closer. “Hey.”

For some reason Jean’s face feels rather heated. “Aren’t you nervous?” he blurts, his voice cracking on the first syllable.

“Not really,” Armin says, “Not anymore.” He shrugs. “We’ve already done all we can. It’s in the judges’ hands now, and that’s going to take a while.” He takes a peek over his shoulder at the double-doors into the viewing room. “No point in worrying over something we can’t control.”

Jean nods and mouths “right.” A dark cloud materializes in the back of his head, twisting his lips into a frown.

Armin looks at him. “What’s wrong? It feels like your mind has been somewhere else entirely all day.”

He wishes he could be so perceptive about other people. He wishes for many things, but that is a big one.

He sighs. His throat hurts.

“My best friend is moving away today, and I won’t get to see him off,” he confesses.

The corners of Armin’s lips pull downward slightly. “I’m sorry. Is he going far?”

Jean scoffs. “More like the other side of the country.” Armin hums once in sympathy. “His flight leaves at two, but we have to stay here all day, so.”

Armin blinks hard at him a few times, steals a glimpse at the digital watch on his wrist, and furrows his eyebrows.

“Well, why don’t we just go?”

Jean frowns deeper. “What?”

“We can just go,” Armin says, opening his hands in front of him. “It’s eleven o’clock right now. Why not?”

“You’re serious?” Jean asks. The pressure is building in his cheekbones and his throat. He can hardly breathe all the sudden.

Armin nods. “Yeah.” He turns and heads into the crowd. “Yeah, let’s go. Your friend is important, and there’s no point in us staying the whole time, anyway.”

Jean’s jaw falls open. He stares wide-eyed into the mass of people for a moment before clarity strikes him and takes off all the weight at once. He clenches his teeth and charges forth.

Armin gently taps his teacher’s forearm. “Excuse me, Ms. Zoe, but we need to go back home right now.” Jean catches up to them, now unable to catch his breath at all.

She furrows her eyebrows, purses her lips and blinks. “Okay,” she says with hesitation. She turns toward the two men with her. “I’ll catch up with you later, then, Mike, Levi,” she enunciates. “Take care.”

The three of them take long strides together toward the exit, picking up their belongings on the way.

“I thought you boys wanted to stay the night here,” she says.

“We did,” Armin replies, “But something else has come up.” He looks past Ms. Zoe to Jean. They push out the door, fly down the stairs. Jean has never appreciated the eccentric Ms. Zoe as much as he does in this very moment – no other teacher in the world, he thinks, would go along with something like this the same way she is.

And Jean explains. He has only one friend – his best friend in the universe, who understands him like no one else and has known him since kindergarten. Not too long ago the friend’s parents got divorced. Now his mom is taking him and his siblings and moving them to – to _Buffalo, New York_ , of all places, and Jean’s not going to be there to say goodbye. At least, he wouldn’t be. By the time he’s finished talking, Ms. Zoe has just driven the car out of the garage, and Jean feels as though all the wind has just been sucked out of him.

“The flight takes off at two,” Armin adds, leaning far forward to put his hands on the back of the driver seat. “If we go fast, we can make it to the airport before he boards.”

Ms. Zoe throws them a look via the rearview mirror. “You know, boys, legally, I’m not allowed to speed in this thing.”

Armin plops back into the correct sitting position, the seatbelt snapping tight against his chest. Jean exhales and starts to shake despite himself.

Then she smiles. “But I think they’ll understand.” The car accelerates – Jean’s head is thrown backward with the movement, he can sense the rumble of the engine in his chest. Ms. Zoe flips on the turn signal, looks over her shoulder, cuts across two lanes and cruises onto the highway.

***

The air between Jean and the security guard escorting him is tense as they breeze through the terminal, the soles of their four leather shoes echoing against the tile. They round a turn, and gate C30 comes into full view.

Jean stretches his neck to see further ahead – and spots him right away, with the short dark hair and last year’s debate club T-shirt. He breaks into a mad dash. “Marco!”

Marco jumps at the sound of his voice and spins on his heels. His eyes widen to the size of saucers. He stands there a second, frozen, as if it’s all a hallucination. The biggest grin splashes onto his face.

“Jean!” He lets go of his carryon bag and sprints toward him, arms outstretched.

The boys slam together and throw their arms around each other in the tightest, strongest, heaviest hug either of them has ever had.

Marco’s eyes, ears and nose are red when he finally pulls away more than two minutes later. His voice shakes. “I – I – I…” He gives up on articulating and just starts to laugh, shoulders convulsing and pale skin reddening until tears start to drip down his face.

“Shoot,” Marco says. He swipes his index finger under one of his bottom eyelids to flick away the tear. “I said I wasn’t going to cry today. Now my brother’s gonna tease me.” He sniffles and gasps a bit. “How – why are you here?”

“I can text you the story later. It’ll give you something to read during the layover,” Jean jokes. The backs of his eyes start to sting. He looks for a split second over Marco’s shoulder at the bewildered former Mrs. Bodt and her remaining son and daughters.

Marco laughs again, a slight painful sound joining it. All at once he clenches his teeth, grips Jean’s shoulders and stares him straight in the eyes.

“Jean, listen to me,” he says. “I meant to tell you this earlier but couldn’t figure out how to put it.”

Jean raises his eyebrows in anticipation. Marco takes a deep breath.

“You are amazing, okay?” Marco says. “You’re hilarious and smart and a great leader. You are the best friend I ever could have asked for, and I’m so glad I got to grow up with you. I’m gonna miss you more than I could ever comprehend.”

Jean bites his lip and blinks to try to dam the tears that are now definitely forming.

“Please, don’t forget that you’re amazing.”

Every ounce of his strength dies away now. Jean lets out a high-pitched squeak and an exasperated grunt, and with that the flood comes. He shakes his head. “You’re just saying that.” Marco laughs again, and he laughs, too.

On the other side of the airport, just in front of the security scanners, Armin and Ms. Zoe sit on a bench. He observes the activity around them, his leg bobbing. Her cell phone makes a pinging sound, and she digs it out of her purse and says, “Ah.”

He turns toward her.

“That was Mike texting me,” she tells him after reading. She blackens the screen. “The results have been posted.”

Armin cocks his head. “Oh?”

“You and Jean placed first,” she says.

He leans away from her, and gulps down his surprise. She breaks into a smile. “I knew you boys would make it far. Your work is truly genius. I guess the judges agreed with me.”

Armin gazes into space, shakes his head and faces her again. “Does this mean we have to go back for the award ceremony dinner?” he asks.

“Looks like,” she says proudly. She looks down quickly to check the hour on her phone. “But we’ll go in a minute. We have time.”

He smiles back and nods, and after a minute clicks his tongue and thanks her.

“It was not a problem at all,” she replies. She giggles. “Truth be told, this is nowhere near the craziest thing I’ve ever done.” Somehow, Armin believes her.

***

_What a fucking day._

Jean shuffles out of the bathroom, the ends of his hair still damp, and stands at the foot of his bed. He stays there for a moment, frozen and staring blankly. He collapses onto it like a tree snapped in half by lightning. Distantly he hears Armin, settled in the other bed with a book in his hands and a pair of glasses over his eyes, chuckling.

“How are you not dying?” Jean asks, his voice muffled against the comforter.

“That’s a fair question,” Armin says. “I guess I still have some adrenaline left.”

“Hell,” Jean blurts.

Without picking up his head he crawls up the bed, worms his way under the covers, presses his face into the pillow and lets his limbs sprawl and relax.

Maybe it’s the stress of the competition, or interacting with so many people at once at the awards dinner, or having ridden the roads for more than six total hours today. Regardless he feels so drained that he cannot even bring himself to care that it’s hard to breathe with his nose buried in memory foam. The darkness starts to sweep over him.

“Oh.” Jean hears the sheets rustle on Armin’s bed, and wills himself to raise his head off the pillow and open one eye. Armin is looking at him through the glare of the wall lamp on his glasses. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

Jean starts. He completely forgot.

He lifts his head higher, props himself on his elbows, opens the other eye and frowns a little. “Thanks,” he says. A chill shudders down the back of his throat, making a low rumbling sound. He blinks at him and furrows his eyebrows further. “How did you know?”

“We’re friends on Facebook,” Armin says flatly. He keeps his eyes locked on Jean for a few seconds, and then smiles and chuckles in a light, sweet way.

Without thinking Jean half-snorts-half-grunts in mirrored response. “Oh, yeah, that’s right,” he lilts. He hasn’t been on Facebook in months. The realization hits him that Armin could have had a birthday recently that he forgot – he doesn’t know when Armin’s birthday is at all. He swallows quietly to stop from breaking a sweat.

“I brought a present for you, but I plum forgot about it until now,” Armin explains, sounding a tad flustered – his voice is tenser and not as sure –, which is so unlike him. He returns his attention to the paperback in his hands. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll give it to you in the morning since you’re so tired now.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Jean says. He feels the cool air bristle the hair on his arms. His heart flails and sinks in his chest, like a falling maple seed. “You’ve done so much for me already.” He can’t even begin to quantify how much Armin has done.

Armin angles his head halfway toward him, takes one hand off his book and waves up and down once. “Don’t worry about it,” he says with a smile.

Something about that smile infects Jean. His lips spread outward into a grin, and he blinks long and slow at the boy, and feels warm all over again.

He returns to his novel. Jean squints at the cover. “What are you reading, anyway?”

Armin moves his hand just a bit to glance at the front cover of his book, as if he has not been holding the thing for hours. “ _Bless Me, Ultima_ ,” he says. He brings the covers together but leaves his thumbs on the page he had open. “I read it once a few years ago, but wanted to read it again since it’s the next novel for English class.”

“Oh, so you’re one of _those_ kids,” Jean retorts.

“One of what kids?” Armin looks concerned.

Jean just snorts as if everyone in the world would understand what he’s talking about.

“Is that what you do for fun?” Jean asks, “Read? I never have time to read for fun.”

“Yeah, it’s one thing, I guess.” Armin shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t like to limit myself to just one or two hobbies.”

As it turns out, Armin Arlert is a managing editor on the school’s newspaper staff, a debate team member (he actually knew Marco – not well, but knew him, spoke to him a number of times before), a National Merit Scholar, and a book club member. He also writes a blog and holds a regular summer job at a library. He was an officer in the math club last semester but had to quit for personal reasons.

Jean whistles. “Damn, Armin, do you even sleep?” Armin sighs and jokes, “Sometimes.”

He feels like an inadequate student in comparison – all he’s a member of is the track team, French club and Key Club International, and the latter two he only attends the bare minimum number of meetings required to list them honestly on his college applications.

Oh, yeah, Armin is in Key Club, too.

“Fuck, seriously?” Jean whines, and Armin only laughs.

Then he blinks through his glasses at the furthest wall. “Do you think Ms. Zoe can hear us?” he asks.

Jean looks at the door joining their room with their teacher’s, and says, “Eh, even if she can, I’m sure she’s cool.”

Armin hunches forward, glances about the room, files a bookmark into his paperback and lowers the book onto the nightstand.

“Don’t you ever feel stressed?” Jean continues.

Armin tilts his head and gazes at the popcorn ceiling. At length he shrugs. “Not really. I look at it as broadening my horizons.”

“I look at it as killing yourself for no damn good reason,” Jean replies. “Just two or three activities, a decent SAT score and decent GPA will get you into a university.” At least, those are Jean’s plans, anyway. If it took less then he wouldn’t bother.

As the night wears on Jean finds that, to a degree, he does know Armin. He knows Armin prefers tea to coffee. He knows Armin types upwards of 80 words per minute. He knows Armin’s delicate features and long golden hair and mist-on-a-hot-summer-afternoon voice, his pacifism and perceptiveness and open mind and wisdom beyond his years, his enviable ability to stay on top of everything no matter how much is on his plate.

He knows Armin does the things he does because he wants to feel like he’s good enough – good enough for what being the bigger, perhaps unsolvable question. Jean doesn’t fancy himself a people expert, but this much he can tell, thinking on their conversation while he watches sleeping Armin’s slow breathing through the dark many hours later. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love hanji so fucking much. she is my favorite snk character. not even lying. 
> 
> i apologize only a little for the jeanmarco. it is platonic here i swear. the main pairing is still jean/armin.


	3. Sickness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do not give me a prompt like this (sickness) or i will wreak havoc 
> 
> tumblr user ascensionablaze is the miracle beta as well as answer-provider for so many questions i had while writing this. thank you grl /prostrates self on the ground/ 
> 
> next chapter is probably gonna be hella long. anything to avoid -- GASP -- studying

“If you’re happy, if you’re feeling good, then nothing else matters.” _Robin Wright_

***

Jean Kirchstein is currently freaking out.

Most of the time he doesn’t worry too much about finals – they’re just a set of more tests. But he hates his physics class with a passion and the teacher has been talking since March about how hard the exam is going to be.

He kicks back his chair, leaning far to skim over the computer lab. He fixes his eyes on the door. Physics review in hand. He feels a bit awkward about it, but asking a pure genius like Armin for help studying is not a bad option at all, at this point. He waits and waits for him to appear, the thought of asking for help like this making his throat constrict.

This is about the time that Armin would walk into the room with his friends. Since the trip to State, he’s been splitting time between sitting with them and sitting with Jean – though, oddly enough, he has been absent all week thus far. Today, too: Loud Dude and Asian Girl walk through the door without him.

Jean watches them. He opens his mouth as they approach, and lifts a hand partway to flag them down. Neither of them notices until they’ve already passed him and he shouts, “Hey!” A few other people turn and look at Jean, too, but he doesn’t care so much about them.

Loud Dude and Asian Girl stare at him a minute, and he stares back at them, at once feeling frustratingly ineloquent (Asian Girl sure is pretty) and desperate. He stands from his chair.

“You’re Aaron and Mi-casa, right? You’re Armin’s friends?”

 _Eren and Mikasa_ visibly loosen, and Eren takes half a step toward him. “Yeah.”

Jean takes in their expressions. Eren’s green eyes are intense with anger, worry, almost grief; Mikasa has bundled her scarf up to her chin. (Why she wears the same red scarf practically every day, no matter the weather, Jean can only guess.)

He clears his throat, takes a breath and pushes out the words. “Okay, where is Armin? Why hasn’t he been around? Is there a debate tournament or something?” Marco used to skip classes the days before debate tournaments to rehearse and research and generally prepare, he remembers.

Eren and Mikasa falter just slightly. They turn and exchange small, quick looks, and then look at Jean again.

“You don’t know?”

Jean blinks a few times, startled, and glances between their suddenly solemn expressions. All at once his heart plummets in his chest.

***

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Armin beat ALL before, about seven years ago: doctors said that if it did not recur within five years, then he was technically cured, but. Anomalies happen. And Armin is an anomaly in himself. His friends began to suspect something was not quite right when he exhibited severe flu symptoms in mid-spring, almost out of nowhere. Armin did his best to hide his symptoms (Jean for one had absolutely no clue this was even going on), and whenever somebody pointed out that he seemed unwell, he denied it – “Naw, I’m fine” or “It’s not a big deal.” Once his grandfather caught on, though, that was that. Everything happened so fast.

Eren Jaeger and Mikasa Ackerman live in the apartment directly across the hall from Armin’s. The three of them are close, intimate best friends, having never been apart a day in their memories. They have visited Armin at the hospital every day since he was admitted to the cancer ward on Sunday.

They tell Jean that he can follow them straight there as soon as school lets out today, if he wants, and Jean does without hesitation.

***

Armin is reading Charles Dickens when his friends come into the room, but he sets aside his book the second he hears the door open. Mikasa enters first with a stack of papers that she plops onto his lap. “Here’s today’s homework,” she says. “It’s not much. The only class we even did anything in today was English.”

“Thank you,” Armin replies. She looks beyond him at yesterday’s homework, finished and neatly piled on the bedside table.

Eren raps his knuckles on the open door. “Knock-knock.”

Armin turns toward him with a smile, and sees Jean behind him and smiles a little wider. “Hey!”

Jean passes Eren and stops right beside the bed. Eren and Mikasa stand at the foot of it.

“I’m sorry about…” Jean trails off. The tubes and wires catch his attention, and he scans over all of them in a horror he tries to contain. For a fleeting moment his arms, legs and neck tingle and go limp, and he shudders to keep himself standing.

“It’s okay,” Armin replies.

Jean’s attention snaps back to him. He bites his lip at the sickly pallor of Armin’s skin. “How are you feeling?” he finally asks.

“I started chemo two days ago,” Armin answers, tilting his head a little.

“And?” Without thinking Jean grabs onto the edge of the mattress.

Armin blinks slowly, presses his lips together and clicks his tongue, formulating some way to word this. “I threw up three times just this morning,” he declares. His expression flattens.

Eren sucks in air with a hissing sound and Jean’s face contorts into a mix of shock, terror and disgust. The tingling intensifies into a sharp pain in his throat.

“Sorry if that’s TMI,” Armin says. “Things have been kind of miserable so far. Otherwise I would be home by now.” His blue eyes flit from Jean to Eren to Mikasa and then back, and he forces himself to smile again. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger. “But you know what I’ve started watching? _Dance Moms_.”

“Wow,” Eren says, and he starts to laugh. Jean laughs with him too – hesitantly at first, as if he’s not sure the reaction is permissible for the mood. “You have hit a new low.”

Armin’s eyes brighten and a little color comes to his face. “But it’s actually really intense!”

“What, have you run out of nature shows?” Mikasa asks.

“No,” Armin laughs, shaking his head, “It’s just that interesting.”

Armin loves documentaries with the burning passion of a thousand suns. He told Jean that night at the hotel in the capital that he wants to be an oceanographer when he gets older, because he finds that particular science endlessly fascinating. And because, even though he has never seen the ocean in person, living and working by it is a fantasy of his. Jean, in contrast, couldn’t have less of an idea of what he wants to do with his life, but he finds Armin’s enthusiasm adorable all the same.

There’s not really any other way to Armin’s enthusiasm, he pondered a day or two after the trip, which made his heart flutter in his chest.

“Well, it’s not like you have too terribly much to do, cooped up in a hospital room like this,” Jean says with a shrug. Armin normally does so much. He’s always making use of his time. It must be killing him, really, to not be able to do anything but lie around 24 hours a day – killing him more than the cancer itself. A chill rattles Jean’s bones, and sweat pricks at the back of his neck.

Armin smiles sideways at him as if to say he does not need any excuses. Jean glances at the homework, the charging laptop and the towers of library books on the nightstand. There are also get-well cards from the school journalism staff and a number of friends and relatives.

The instant everyone hears the door swing open, they look toward the sound. An older man in suspenders shuffles into the room.

“Grandpa—!” Armin grins genuinely now at the greeting.

“Hey, kiddo.” He waves his tan panama hat. “Snuck out of work early. I’ll have to split again for a meeting in a few minutes, though.” He pads up to the side of the bed – Jean scoots over to give him space. The man lays his relatively young-looking left hand on the blanket over Armin’s leg. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Armin replies.

The man turns toward the two at the foot of the bed and pays them each a regarding nod. “Eren, Mikasa. Glad to see you’re here for him.”

Eren returns the nod and mumbles, “Sir.”

Then he looks to Jean, and scrutinizes his face for a second or so. Jean fidgets.

“Are you one of Armin’s friends? I don’t think we’ve met before.” The old man squints as he forms a broad smile under his mustache. He holds out his right hand. “Peter Arlert. I’m Armin’s grandfather, as you can probably tell.”

Jean’s attention bounces from one feature to another all over the man’s face, trying to find any resemblances between the man and his grandson underneath the wild facial hair. There aren’t many. He grabs Peter’s hand and shakes it. “Jean – uh, Kirchstein.” He feels hot in the throat. Their hands separate and drop to their sides. “I was his partner for that comp-sci project,” he adds.

“Oh!” Peter exclaims, nodding and raising his eyebrows. “Armin told me about you, actually. I’m happy to finally meet you.”

Jean glances at Armin – at the bags under his eyes and the messiness of his long blond hair, so very atypical for him – and wonders if he talks about him with an ounce of the fervor he reserves for the ocean he loves. 


	4. [free] Strength

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so thrilled about all the feedback y'all have given me so far! thank you, from the bottom of my heart. 
> 
> told you this chapter would be long. it was exhausting writing this today, i'll tell you what, especially since the final i'm most worried about is tomorrow. can you tell i tried to speed up the writing process for this chapter? 
> 
> anyway today's prompt was just a free space so i made my own prompt, strength. may the jearmin be with you. 
> 
> tumblr user ascensionablaze did her usual thing and i am thankful for that. also thank you to tumblr user hibikun for helping clear up some stuff about the french.

  
“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.” _Charles Dickens_

***

Jean Kirchstein spends hours on Google that evening, looking for all the information he can possibly find that is even tangentially related to leukemia.

Around 10:00 he happens to take his eyes off the computer screen for a second and sees the blank test review lying on the edge of his desk. All at once the energy leaks out of him, as if he’s a balloon that has been pricked with a needle. He leans back against the spindles of the wooden chair and lets his vision faze into space. A pressure he did not know was building leaves the front of his head.

It may be too late, but he has to wonder why he is concerning himself with any of this. He has never been a cancer patient. Neither have any of his relatives. The only things he can do with this knowledge are stand back and gnaw his fingers at the parallels between survivor anecdotes – or victim’s eulogies – he’s read and Armin’s own pain.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out with a curt sigh, folds his laptop shut and edges toward the front of his seat in preparation to get up. He may as well go to bed now – he can finish (start) his homework tomorrow over breakfast. His phone screen lights in his peripheral. A text message from Marco. _Want to facetime?_

Jean chews the inside corners of his lips. He plucks the iPhone from its charging port and starts the FaceTime session without hesitation.

Marco answers almost immediately, and his short hair is ruffled and freckled cheeks are taut and his brown eyes have a look of fear about them. “Hey,” he greets with a temporary smile.

“You look stressed,” Jean observes.

Marco sighs. “It. Is just. Really _hard_ transferring schools in the middle of a semester.” He stops himself from rolling his eyes. His attention is startled away from the camera for a moment as he cranes his neck partway behind him and grinds his teeth at something going on off-screen. “Fiona, _please_ cut it out,” he groans. His voice is strained. Jean hears the start of a giggle and a door slamming before Marco returns to him. “I’m sorry. The twins are being – a challenge today.”

Thankful only-child Jean grunts once and tries to remember Marco’s sisters’ age – 11, right? He glances at his digital alarm clock. “Isn’t it past their bedtime?”

“That’s part of the problem,” Marco replies.

Something must be very, very awry in the life of Marco Bodt for him to act this way. Jean’s seen it only two or three times before – Marco being consistently not-positive, Marco having to think before articulating his usual word choices, Marco cracking – and it is scary as shit.

“Anyway.” Marco changes the topic with a wave of the hand and a willful lift of tone. “I’m sorry I missed your text earlier. I was with a study group. What’s up?”

Jean waits a beat, unsure of whether to pursue Marco’s issues or go along with the distracting tangent. “Do you know Armin Arlert?” he asks finally.

“Yeah, I know him,” Marco says with a nod. He starts to gush, “He’s such a cool guy. He’s so smart. He knows everything, and he’s really humble about it, too.”

 _Tell me about it_ , Jean thinks.

Marco points a finger at the camera. “Isn’t he the guy you did that comp-sci project with?” he asks.

“He is,” Jean proclaims. He holds back a fond smile and the urge to peek at the gold medals draped over his trophy shelf.

He takes a breath in anticipation for the acid sting this announcement will bring on his tongue. “He, ah, has leukemia.” Here comes that sting. He pulls his eyes away from Marco’s gaze – he doesn’t want to see his hand fly to his mouth. “I found out today.”

“That’s awful,” Marco says. “Is he okay? —Well, no, of course he’s not okay. He has cancer, stupid. Is he going to be okay?”

Maybe Jean cares so much because Armin is more or less the closest friend he has here since Marco lives in a different time zone. Which, considering it again, makes him feel pathetic, as they did not exchange a single word until this past February, and it’s only May now.

“God willing. He started chemo the other day. Apparently he is off to a shaky start with it, though.”

Marco sucks in air between his teeth. “Wow.” From this angle Jean can still sense Marco shaking his head. Marco chuckles. “Just when you think you’re having a crappy day…”

Jean files his fingers into the longer hair on top of his head. _Crappy day, indeed._ He pushes air out of his mouth. “I can’t stop thinking about it, you know?” The vulnerability in his voice leaves an empty sensation below his throat that he does not like, does not like at all, and he gulps to try to fill it but it does not go away.

Marco is unsure how to respond, angling his head downward as if in prayer. The smallest of smiles graces his face. “Well…” He lifts his head now, toward the ceiling, and his eyelids flutter shut and open.

“Enough about what’s going on here,” Jean blurts. He and Marco meet eyes via their cameras.

For all the times Marco has lent a listening ear to Jean on his bad days, for all the human decency buried in the unfounded bitterness in Jean’s conscience – he nods once and says, “Forget what I said. Come on and vent to me.”

Jean lost Marco. There was nothing Jean could do to keep Marco – and despite texting every day, Facebook-chatting, Skyping, and phone and FaceTime calls it is just not the same without him. Marco is miles and miles and hours and days away. Marco is a lagging video, a series of electrical impulses, an untouchable block of code, a collection of photographs and memories that went by too fast.

Jean is not going to lose anybody else. Jean is not going to lose Armin.

***

Armin seems pleasantly surprised when Jean shows up on his own the next day. (He actually took a much longer time than he’ll ever admit at Target between track practice and heading for the hospital, struggling to figure out some sort of present for him. At last he settled on a newly released book by some fancy-pants psychologist. Only once Armin takes it with overwhelming gratitude does Jean realize he’s probably read a million books exactly like it.)

“What’re you up to?” Jean asks, indicating the spiral notebook in Armin’s lap.

“Oh, just writing an op-ed.” Armin closes his fountain pen in the notebook and tucks it away on the bedside table, explaining how the newspaper advisor let him off the hook in terms of finishing the original stories he was assigned on the condition that he write something about his experience.

Jean nods and partly shrugs to shove his hands in his pants pockets. “And how are you today?”

Armin tilts his head from side to side. “I’m okay, a little nauseous at the moment, but I am running out of reading material.” He thanks Jean again for the gift. The much taller of the book towers is on the floor now – Jean assumes that’s the done pile. He doesn’t think he can go through that many books in a year, let alone, what, five days? How fast can this guy read, anyway?

Eren and Mikasa must have already come and gone – today’s homework, completed, sits on the table. There are two more cards and a photo in a temporary frame of some people who look to be related to him.

Jean chuckles a bit. He glances at a standing bag of liquid and follows the catheter all the way to Armin’s wrist, and scans over Armin’s whole body, and a chill rattles his bones. He forgets what he was going to say next, wonders if he had anything else to say in the first place.

Armin’s phone rings out and he grabs it and turns off the timer. “ _Dance Moms_ is on,” he announces. Jean sputters trying to not laugh. He takes a glimpse at the clock on the wall (5:00) while Armin grabs the remote and aims it at the TV mounted on the wall. “You can pull up a chair if you want.” Jean does not hesitate to push one of the small, stiff chairs from the corner up to Armin’s bedside. He sits, resting one elbow on the bed, and feels a bit jumpy in the chest as he brings his attention to the screen. _Previously on_ Dance Moms _…_

He sits through about two and a half seconds of Abby’s narration before he has to take his eyes off the TV. For some reason his body feels dense, restless. He focuses on breathing, and turns toward Armin and studies his profile for a long moment. He pictures a complicated series of gears whirring inside Armin’s blond head, watches his chest expand and contract underneath the hospital gown. A comfortable warmth spreads through him, and he relaxes in the chair and—

Armin notices Jean staring, turns toward him and blinks. Jean feels caught like a deer in headlights.

“It is pitiable how these parents pry so much into their children’s lives,” Armin says without missing a beat. “At least, that’s how I feel. I’ve always fancied myself a more independent child.”

Jean nods and hums and tries to recall times when his mom and dad have been overbearing. A few come to mind. “Yeah,” he replies. He remembers Armin mentioning something about his parents’ funeral that night at the hotel. He bows his head a bit and crosses his arms. “Feels like some of the moms are living vicariously through their daughters.”

Armin taps his index finger to the end of his button nose, smiling subtly. He returns to the television, but his smile does not last a second more. His face seems to darken.

 _Coming up on_ Dance Moms _…_

The boys sit in silence as the first commercial plays. Jean’s eyes wander, seeking something to hold their concentration. The crispness of the air hits him suddenly.

“You know,” Armin begins, his honey voice low, and Jean snaps to him, “The first time my cancer appeared, I drained two-thirds of my grandpa’s life savings to get treatment.”

Jean shudders and his shoulders relax, and he pictures a pair of shadowy hands swiping away a pile of hard-earned money.

Armin’s frown deepens. He takes a deep, sharp breath, and the sound of it quickly pulls Jean back to reality. “This time everybody’s saying I need a transplant, on top of chemo.” He bows his head low to try to bury his face. “At this rate my grandpa will never retire. We might even lose our home.” All the stability vacuums out of his voice. He covers his face with an open hand.

“I hate being such a burden.” Armin bares his teeth, moans, and quivers to hold back a sob.

It is an awful, awful sound. Jean clutches his chest, and his stomach churns and flips and he feels like throwing up, himself.

Armin brings up his other hand to cover his face – the hand with the needle and tube stuck into the wrist –, wailing into his palm.

Without thinking he stands from his chair, wraps his arms around Armin’s torso, rests his chin on Armin’s shoulder, breathing warm into the base of his neck, and strokes the top of his pretty blond head. Armin pulls out his arms from between them and grips the fabric of Jean’s shirt weakly. His entire body erupts into sobbing tremors.

He could say a thousand different things – he could spill forth his heart from his lips, tell Armin it is not his fault that this is happening to him and that everyone loves him and cares about him and he is worth every effort and bit of pain because God, he is _amazing_ , so amazing. But he knows Armin has heard it all before and not listened. The thought of all of the guilt surrounding those wasted words just kills Jean, stabs him straight through the heart.

Distantly, the commercials end, and Abby starts talking again.

Jean wills the tears out of his own eyes with a loud sniffle. He clicks his tongue and pulls just a bit away. He gently tucks a strand of Armin’s long hair behind his ear with his free hand. The front of his French club T-shirt is damp.

“Tell me about the ocean,” Jean murmurs.

Armin sniffles and lifts his head. “Huh?” His face is red and swollen. His blue eyes glisten with wet.

“Tell me about the ocean.”

Because this is not the kind of pain he deserves, and Jean can’t stand to hear him cry anymore. And he is captivating, utterly beautiful, when he talks about the ocean.

“What about the ocean?” Armin squeaks. He sniffles again.

“Anything,” Jean replies. He cups Armin’s wet, chubby cheek. “You know a hell of a lot about it.”

For some reason, it feels good, holding him this way.

Armin lets out a breathy chuckle and squints into space for a minute. He whimpers once and sniffles a few times. “Well, there was this study released back in December, about the coasts.”

“Uh-huh,” Jean says.

“They are actually absorbing more CO-two than they’re producing,” he says. “So, it turns out, the ocean is even more instrumental in balancing atmospheric” – sniffle – “content than originally thought.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I’m a total dork.”

Jean lifts both his hands into the air. “Hey, I was the one who told you to talk.” He lays both hands on Armin’s shoulders. “Everybody’s a dork about something.”

“I’m a dork about a lot of things,” Armin says, and chuckles.

“And that’s great,” Jean replies. He tilts his head and mutters, “I’m just a dork in general. Nothing special.”

Nothing special. Jean is so tired of doing nothing special. He wishes he could have dreams like his friends have. He wishes he could feel proud enough of his country to be a Marine, like Marco, or have enough passion for nature to be a scientist, like Armin. He has always thought he would simply be like his father: go to an average university, study a lucrative major he doesn’t much care about, work some sort of mundane until he’s too old to get out, and then maybe he’d golf through retirement like his papy. Sometimes he pictures himself wrinkled, bored and in plaid ankle-pants; something about the image draws a sigh from deep within his chest.

Armin laughs. “No, you are. You’re really talented at HTML coding.”

“HTML is easy,” he argues, “And you’re better.” He presses his fingers over Armin’s lips. “Now, shush, and tell me more about the ocean and junk.”

“Take your hand off my mouth first,” Armin says, his voice muffled. Jean swipes his hand back and the two of them laugh. He pulls further away and hoists himself up to sit on the side of the bed. He kicks the tennis shoes off his feet onto the floor. Armin bundles his legs closer to his chest to give Jean room.

His voice steadies, returns to its normal hot-coffee-down-a-sore-throat-on-a-chilly-morning sound, as he begins to speak. “Well, some scientists announced yesterday that they found a new plant species they had thought to be extinct.” He holds Jean’s undivided attention the whole time. By the time he leaves Jean has more knowledge about the Goddamn ocean than he will ever need, and somehow, that feels perfectly fine.

***

Dinner at the Kirchstein house tonight is pizza, the same as it always is on Friday nights. As soon as the delivery arrives everyone convenes in the kitchen. Jean turns on the TV to a rerun of _The Simpsons_ , the family’s entertainment staple, slings two slices of cheese pizza onto his plate (pepperoni grosses him out), and sits at his regular spot at the table.

His gentle maman Marguerite was born and raised in France – her accent is still thick even though she has lived in the United States for 20 years, but aside from this her command of English is better than that of anyone else Jean knows –, and she is a counselor at a drug rehab clinic. His dad Ethan is a typical American, a midlevel executive at a corporation.

Jean hardly eats. His muscles are tight with anxiousness. He almost says something at the start of the first commercial break, taking a breath and working the right words up to his throat.

“Who’s fast-forwarding?” Dad jokes. He squints at the remote control left on the bar counter, as if concentrating hard enough will activate some dormant form of telepathy, until Jean sighs, not relieving any of the tension inside him, drags himself out of the chair, grabs the remote and drops it into the center of the table.

His parents are used to his sass, but understand the difference between Jean acting like Jean and Jean being distressed.

“ _Mon petit_ ,” Marguerite says, “What’s wrong?”

Without any further prompting Ethan reaches forward and clicks the pause button.

Jean studies one parent’s face, then another, and takes a breath. He dances around the words in his head, trying for the subtlest possible way to say this.

“Do we have any extra money lying around?” he asks finally, pointing his joined fingertips in their general direction.

His parents furrow their eyebrows a bit and glance at each other. “How much are we talking?” Dad asks cautiously.

Consciously Jean hums, tilts his head to the side and searches the ceiling. “About fifty-thousand.”

Maman’s jaw falls open. “What did you do?!” Dad yells.

Jean shakes his head and waves his hands side to side through the air. “Oh, no, it’s not for me! It’s for someone else.”

“Jean…?” The air pressure seems to drop.

He sighs and tells them Armin’s situation, playing especially on the facts that he went to State with him and that he’s a good kid. In the end, they sit in contemplation for a moment. The TV switches to power-save mode, the satellite company’s logo bouncing around a black screen. They smile little proud smiles.

“ _Mon petit_ ,” Maman says slowly, “We don’t have that kind of money to spend right now – at least not without making major changes to our lifestyle. We know you want to help your friend, but.” She narrows her eyes into space to find the right way to finish her thought.

“Maybe you could get a job?” Dad suggests, “Or raise money?” She looks at him nods.

“I could,” Jean replies without thinking.

All the sudden a metaphorical lightbulb pops into being above his head. His breath catches in his throat. He starts to nod.

“I could.”

***

Jean texts Marco _FT w me ASAP_ , and Marco calls not even two minutes later.

“What’s up?” Marco asks. He’s locked himself in the so far empty den of his new Buffalo home.

“Okay, hear me out.” Jean claps his hands together. “I have an idea.”

“Do tell,” Marco says with enthusiasm.

Jean is not normally one to take initiative – not that he’s lazy, just that he doesn’t tend to see merit in going out of his way to fix what’s not broken. Whenever he does come up with an action to take, though, at least in Marco’s experience, it is almost _always_ brilliant. This time is no exception.

“That sounds so great!” Marco says finally. “I’m totally down with helping you, —any way I can.”

Jean grins. A heartfelt “thank you, Marco” slips out of him. He knew he would support him. Saint Marco. Marco the Great. Marco the best friend a person could ever want.

“But, could I ask—” Jean perks up at his friend’s question, “What are you raising money for?”

“To help Armin,” he answers.

“Oh!” Marco’s eyes brighten. “Then I’m definitely on board!”

“You are literally _the_ best,” Jean says, and he bows at the waist in front of the camera.

Marco laughs. “I just do what I can.”

What a typical Marco answer.

“I actually wanted to talk about something else, too, today,” Marco starts.

“What’s that?” Jean asks.

He shrugs his shoulders against the sides of his neck in a giddy way, his cheekbones protruding with the huge smile on his face. “I have a girlfriend,” he announces.

“Shit,” Jean exclaims, “Already?”

Marco sideways-smiles and angles his eyes toward the ceiling.

“I thought you and Mina were gonna do the long-distance thing,” Jean says.

“Yeah, we were, but…” Marco clicks his tongue, rests his jaw on his palm and tilts his head. “We talked more and decided against it. It’s for the best, I guess.” His voice raises a level. “Anyway. Her name is Johanna Hitch.”

“Christ,” Jean mutters. He flips open his laptop. “I’m gonna look her up on Facebook.” Marco chuckles.

Just as Marco makes friends easily, he also attracts girls like bees to honey. He’s been caught in the dilemma quite a few times of having too many girls approach him at once, and only the last time this happened did he know better than to come to Jean for advice on how to handle the situation, because usually that conversation went similarly to this:

_M: “I just don’t know what to do.”_   
_J: “Do you like all of them back?”_   
_M: “No, not all of them.”_   
_J: “Do you like any of them back?”_   
_M: “Just one. The rest I see more as friends.” Or “Not really, no.”_   
_J: “Then just ask the one girl out and let the rest be.” Or “Then just don’t do anything. Move on.”_   
_M: “But Jean, that’s cruel!”_   
_J: “You are too nice. Someday that’s going to come back and bite you in the ass. Someday you’re going to hear the doorbell ring at your house, and you’ll answer it and it’ll be a really shady-looking dude with a knife and killing intent in his eyes, and he’ll outright say he’s come to slowly and painfully murder you, and you’ll say, ‘Okey-dokey, then! But do you want to have some tea and cookies and talk about feelings first?’”_

Jean, on the other hand, has never dated anybody. He has had a crush here and there, yes. Hell if he knows anyone’s ever liked him that way. Frankly, romance is not something he tends to think about in depth. (All he knows for sure is that he has a thing for long hair.)

He swallows hard and clicks around a few times, and finds the girl’s page with no hassle. She has curly hair and likes Quentin Tarantino movies. The most recent post on her profile page is a sweet picture of her and Marco together. For a fraction of a second, he pictures himself and Armin in a photo just like this, and a contented warmth overcomes him like a drop of ink spreads through water in a painting.

He scowls away the euphoria. While he’s online and thinking about it, he searches his friends list and finds Armin’s profile, which he’s never actually seen before. Armin’s birthday is in November. Huh. So he didn’t miss it. At once he feels relief and determination.

Eren and Mikasa post to his timeline a lot. And the three of them sure do take some hilarious bad-selfies together.

“You still there, Jean?” Marco asks.

Oh, God. Jean might just have a crush on Armin.

That would – that would explain so much about the way he’s been feeling lately.

“Jean?”

“I’m here, sorry,” he stammers. He slams his laptop shut as if his mother has just walked in on him watching porn (like she did that one time). “I just, uh, got distracted.” He forces a nervous chuckle.

Marco stifles a laugh. “Never change, Jean,” he lilts.

“So, how is she? What’s she like?” Jean clears his throat to realign the topic.

He sighs. “I really like her sense of humor. It’s kind of similar to yours.”

“Good for you,” Jean replies in a genuine inflection.

Marco chuckles lightly and says “yeah” under his breath. He fazes out for a few seconds before meeting Jean’s eyes through the camera. “Anyway. That’s my news. I’ll let you go so you can start on your flawless idea.”

“You’re still the best,” Jean says. He throws Marco a two-fingered salute. “Keep watching the skies.”

Marco laughs and the connection is cut.

Jean remains in the same position for several minutes, at once hollow and dense, numb and overcome with sensation, intensely focusing and completely blank. At length he blows air out of his mouth, leans fully against the back of the chair, blinks into space, and wraps his arms around himself.

***

The computer lab is so empty when Jean arrives that he has to flip on the light switch. He still throws some glances around the room as if anticipating some sort of practical joke, and then he dumps his backpack onto his normal seat and closes the door behind him as he leaves. He skulks down the hall and peeks into the meeting room. There is Ms. Zoe, chatting over a cup of Joe with Mr. Moblit, the other computer science teacher (a perpetually nervous guy who also teaches one period of geometry – Jean had him freshman year.)

“Oh, hello, Jean.” She notices him in the doorway right away and stops the conversation. “Do you need something?”

“Ms. Zoe, you know about Armin’s problems, right?” he asks, and he steps further inside.

She glances back and forth. “I know he’s in the hospital,” she says slowly. “We exchanged a few emails last week.”

Jean takes a breath and sighs it out, and meshes his fingers together. “Long story short, Armin has leukemia—”

“Oh, no!” Ms. Zoe exclaims. Her hand flies to her mouth. “What kind of leukemia?”

A little taken aback by the specificity the question demands, it takes a second for him to remember the exact name. “Acute lymphoblastic – er, acute lymphocytic, they’re the same thing.” He knocks his heart into a normal rhythm with a shake of the head.

“He has acute lympho-something leukemia, and his family doesn’t have enough money to pay for all his chemo and the transplant he needs without going pretty broke.”

Mr. Moblit, reading the atmosphere, ducks out of the room.

“I came up with a plan to raise money for him,” he goes on. “I’m going to sell my coding, animating and web-designing skills.”

At this Ms. Zoe rushes forward, her eyes and smile wide. “That is brilliant! So exciting! You are so generous.”

“Not really,” he mutters with an ambivalent smirk. He clears his throat. “You are the one who taught me how to do all that stuff, so I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”

She blinks at him through her thick glasses, her mouth falling open and her arms going limp – she almost spills her coffee.

“You want advice from _me_?” she asks incredulously.

Jean shrugs. “Well, you are kind of the expert, and I trust you as a person.” He remembers the beginning of the year – the beginning of the semester, when he thought she was a total loon and nothing more than a teacher he would feel okay with forgetting after graduation next year.

A _monumental_ -sized grin splits across her face. “Jean Kirchstein, I would be delighted to help!” She steps back and gestures at the ovular table. “Take a seat, take a seat.” He pulls out one of the chairs and does just that.

Ms. Zoe talks his ear off every possible minute until the bell is about to ring. He walks with her into the computer lab, trying to absorb it all. She tells him to email her, too, with any issue he has. He gives her a grateful nod, and she leaves him for her desk.

Jean returns to his station to find Eren standing over him and Mikasa lurking close behind.

“Hey, Kirchstein,” Eren says – with no added maliciousness to his already intense voice, but Jean’s heart thuds against the inside of his ribcage like he’s heard a cougar roar. “It looks like Armin’s coming home Wednesday.”

He smiles. “Really? That’s great!” He drags his backpack off the chair and plops it onto the floor. He feels a twinge of guilt at the back of his throat for not having visited or spoken to him at all over the weekend.

“Isn’t it?” Eren adds. He smiles now. “He’s already starting to lose his hair, though. He’s not excited about that.”

Jean raises his eyebrows and his lips twitch into a grimace. All those pretty golden hairs, falling out. His heart sinks.

“My mom’s a cosmetologist, so she’s gonna shave us bald tomorrow afternoon – us being Mikasa, Mister Arlert and me. You know, just to support him.” He points his thumb at the girl over his shoulder.

“—I’d love to do it, too,” Jean says.

Eren sputters into a laugh. “That would be fantastic!” He throws his head back toward the ceiling.

Mikasa steps forward and holds out her phone. “Put in your number so we can give you our address when it comes time.”

Jean takes her phone and starts to type on the keypad. He can imagine it now, him going home tomorrow night without a strand on his head, and his mother setting her hands on her hips, shaking her head, and complaining, “ _Mon petit_ , why do you always do such weird shit with your hair?” She had the same reaction when he dyed it blue in eighth grade, when he went through his Mohawk phase, when he tried to grow it out for a ponytail, and just this past January when he and Marco started getting undercuts. This time it’s for a good cause, though; it’s for Armin. Nothing else matters. 


	5. Gifts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologizing for the lateness of this chapter. i had a final exam to take and blah blah blah. 
> 
> prompt for today was "gifts". the goddess tumblr user ascensionablaze beta-read. 
> 
> …so how about that snk chapter 52, eh?

“A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.” _Lucius Annaeus Seneca_

***

Jean Kirchstein doesn’t know why he never thought of this before.

He clambers out of bed in the middle of the night, sits in nothing but his boxers on the cool laminated wood of his desk chair, and types out an email to his teacher. In acknowledgement of how tired his mind is, he reads over it for spelling errors a good four times before hitting send, and then closes his laptop and drags himself back to bed.

_Hi, Ms. Zoe._

_I’m thinking, a lot of people know and love Armin – why don’t we start a sort of charity to fund his treatment, you know, before the school year ends or whatever? I’m sure kids would jump at the chance to help him out, whether they know him or not. We could do like some sort of ASPCA commercial about it, sad music and Sarah McLachlan and all. “See this kid? He has cancer. Sad kid. Donate.”_  
            _This on top of fundraising from sales, of course. I already got Marco Bodt to do that with me. Do you remember having him last year? He thought you were a hoot – his words._  
 _Your thoughts? Would you be willing to help out with this or at least spread the word among some other kids and teachers if we go through with this?_

_Jean._

He groans and smacks himself the next morning for the way he worded his message, but she doesn’t seem fazed by it in the least when he reads her reply before leaving for school.

_Jean:_

_I like that idea. It would be nice to get a head start on collecting money by asking for donations among the students and staff. I will pitch it to my teacher friends and the principal and see what we can do. (I do not think Sarah McLachlan will be available, though – unless, that is, you have some sort of connection to her about which I do not know?)  
            And, yes, I do remember Marco. He was a lovely student. _

_Hope to see you in class today – we will be going over part one of the test review.  
Hanji Zoe._

Idling in a spot right outside the Starbucks three blocks from school, he smiles at his phone, drops it into the cupholder that doesn’t contain his drink, and backs his Mazda directly into a parked pickup truck.

***

When Dad arrives, a couple minutes before the police do, Jean is sitting on the curb with his head hung low. His hands won’t stop trembling.

“Are you okay?” is his first question.

“Yeah,” Jean replies shakily. He cannot bring himself to look his father in the face.

Ethan walks around to inspect the wreck. Each vehicle seems drivable, albeit pretty decently smashed-up in the back. The owner of the pickup is from the same high school, a senior named Ymir who would probably have wrung Jean’s neck had her girlfriend not intervened.

The cops, once they determine what went on and that no one was injured, get both parties to sign some paperwork. They talk to Jean as if he is to shoulder all the blame for the accident, though they say nothing is official yet. At that point he doesn’t really care. He is so jittery and anxious that he does not have to drink any of the coffee he came here to buy in the first place.

***

“What’s up, Kirchstein?” Eren answers the door. Jean replies “not much, _Jaeger_ ” and saunters inside.

Two girls sit in the great room playing a travel chess set. One of them is Mikasa on the couch; the other, a blonde in a hoodie (what is it with these girls wearing winter clothing in the middle of goddamn spring?), has taken the armchair. The two of them look up at Jean in some form of acknowledgement when he enters.

“I don’t know if you’ve met,” Eren says. He shuts the door and locks it, and stands at Jean’s side at the edge of the rug. He gestures toward the blond girl. “This is my girlfriend—”

“Annie,” she says.

“Jean,” he replies with a small wave. “Charmed.”

Annie Leonhardt is aloof, cynical, and, judging from her default expression, usually bored. She is also a third-degree black belt in krav maga. Jean has never been formally introduced or spoken to her before, but he thinks he can remember her sitting alone at the back of the room in sophomore English class. She didn’t raise her hand often, but whenever she did her commentary was insightful, if also bleak. Her cousin Reiner is the captain of the school’s varsity football team; she and Mikasa share a friendly rivalry of sorts.

“We’re having a little chess tournament,” Mikasa starts.

Eren jumps into the conversation right away, pointing accusingly at Annie. “Okay, no, she beat the shit out of me! She is merciless!”

“Eren is just bitter because I beat him earlier, too,” Mikasa says, and she continues: “Whichever one of us wins now” – she indicates the current game between her and Annie – “gets to play Armin later.”

“Yeah, and you two’ve been at it for over a freaking hour,” Eren complains.

Jean throws up his arms. “Well, hey, I don’t even know how to play, so.”

“We can teach you sometime,” Mikasa says. She adds a smile. Annie moves one of her black pieces as soon as Mikasa returns her attention to the board.

“Anyway.” Eren turns toward Jean. “My mom should be home from work in about thirty minutes.” He rubs his palms together. “Then the deed shall be done.”

Jean nods and looks at Annie. “Are you going to get shaved too?” he asks her.

“No, I’m just here.” She meets his eyes for only a second and then revisits the game. “I’m not that brave.”

Eren shuffles away, asking Jean if he wants anything to eat or drink, to which he says no. “Eren,” Mikasa calls after him, “Get me some pomegranate juice.”

“We ran out this morning!” Eren replies from in the kitchen. Mikasa frowns and picks up her phone off the edge of the coffee table.

Jean walks the perimeter of the room, taking the liberty of looking around. The Jaeger apartment is warmly furnished and richly colored, and smells of caramel coffee throughout. Down the small hallway leading to the bedrooms and the bathroom, a poster not-very-inconspicuously covers a hole in the wall – he can only guess how the hole was made. After a moment he sits on the edge of the couch about an arm’s length from Mikasa. The TV shows a middleweight UFC fight, functioning as mere background noise for really everyone except her, whose favorite sport in the world is MMA, as it turns out.

Eren reenters the room with half a bottle of mocha Frappuccino. He stands in the corner between the couch and armchair.

“Mom’s gonna be _forty_ minutes,” Mikasa says as she sets down her phone.

He blinks at her, scowling. “Did you seriously just text Mom and ask her to pick up pomegranate juice?”

“It’s an emergency,” Mikasa replies with a straight face. Jean’s cheeks ache from trying to contain a laugh. He meets eyes with Annie, who then just shakes her head. “God,” Eren mutters. (About 45 minutes later, Eren’s mother and Mikasa’s adoptive mother Carla Mackey does indeed come home with the pomegranate juice and a Red Baron pizza, as well as some of her supplies from work. Eren resembles her greatly.)

Strangely, Jean feels at home here, like this. He can breathe easier than he first thought. He scoots back a bit on the seat cushion and studies the chessboard as if he knows what any of the placements mean. Mikasa plucks up a piece that looks like a horse, moves it forward, returns it to its original spot on second thought, and moves her tallest piece one tile backward instead.

He analyzes her and Eren’s faces for a minute or so, trying and failing to picture them bald. He can’t picture Armin or Peter or even himself that way, either. It makes his neck start to cold-sweat, but he swallows it down and runs his hand through the hair on the top of his head, the start of a farewell. His eyes close and he drops his hand onto the armrest.

***

Armin about has a heart attack when he sees his friends hairless for the first time. Jean is at the Arlert apartment for hours after school that day, hanging out, catching up. His heart pounds the entire time, and he spends the dark drive home (in his partly-crumpled car) thinking about just what surprised Armin so much.

The kid thinks so far ahead that he should have anticipated them shaving in support of him – lots of friends and family do that when someone they care about goes through chemotherapy, right? – even if there is a definite shock value that comes with it. Jean pulls safely into the driveway in front of his house, and concludes that Armin must not have thought anybody cared about him enough to do such a thing, despite the overwhelming evidence that everybody loves him.

And everybody _does_ love him. The first people Jean hits up are those who would be closest to him, logically – the newspaper staff, the debate team, Key Club, the math club, NHS kids. All are more than willing, and they tell their friends and those friends tell their other friends. Jean’s fellow French club and track team members help the cause despite largely not knowing the guy. He reaches out to the student council, which is well known for running school-sponsored charities. (Funny enough, the junior class president Historia is the girlfriend of the angry pickup owner. Jean recognizes her right away and is nervous the whole time they talk. She seems to bear no grudge against him, though.) Announcements are made, teachers catch on. Community organizations and other schools in the area make contributions; even Marco drums up a good deal of support at his high school halfway across the country. By the time final exams begin, Jean has a base of thousands – _big_ thousands of dollars at the ready, not to mention how much has been pledged, who hasn’t been approached yet, and what he anticipates earning through his commissions.

After some internal debate he decides to give all he has so far to Peter, on the condition that he and everyone else continue to keep Armin in the dark about what is going on. The kid received permission from the school to take his exams from home anyway – he’s hardly left his apartment building since the hospital released him.

“At this rate, we could pay for chemo, a transplant, radiation, and a cruise or something,” Marco jokes over webcam.

“Yeah,” Jean chuckles. He switches every few minutes between Skype, Adobe Dreamweaver, and an Excel spreadsheet with the names and contributions of all donors.

“It feels so exciting,” Marco gushes, “Like we’re a part of something so much bigger than ourselves, you know?”

Marco’s words make Jean freeze in place.

His whole life he has been just one man, one boy in an ocean, cold and isolated as the waves push him in different directions. He has had Marco, yes, and Maman and Dad, but. He has taken this much time to reach the coasts where the rest of the people are, and now the ocean doesn’t seem like such a bad place anymore, with all these others around. It is warm and he is connected to everyone, not ever going to feel alone again. He can make waves. He has a place.

He hopes to God that at the end of the summer, when he’s reached his goal and can finally reveal what he has done, Armin will know that it is all for him, that he deserves it, and that he loves him – that everyone loves him. Everyone.

***

June comes, school lets out, and the weather quickly turns miserably hot.

Eren flies to his feet, his mouth gaping at the television. “What the hell was that?” he shouts. He plops back onto the couch with his arms crossed.

“She is just ridiculous,” Mikasa says.

Armin sits in the armchair, a quiet sense of satisfaction about him. He knew he could get his friends hooked on _Dance Moms_ – even Jean, who is now bobbing his leg incessantly at how much he cannot stand the people on this show.

The TV cuts to commercial. “I hate this fucking show,” Eren mutters. Then, a little louder as he stands and heads for the kitchen, “I’m getting a popsicle.”

“Could you get me a blue one?” Mikasa asks. She pulls the red scarf looser around her neck.

“Sure.” Eren glances at Armin. “You want one?” Armin shakes his head and waves his hand in the negative.

“I’ll take one, too, Jaeger,” Jean says in a jokingly demanding tone.

“No,” he snorts, and he leaves his friends’ sights.

Armin is physically very fragile nowadays, and he and everyone around him have driven themselves practically mysophobic trying to keep his weakened immune system safe. His hair is extremely thin. He throws up a lot and eats hardly anything – his body weight has plummeted. He’s always tired, unable to move around too much.

The cure is, in some ways, worse than the disease itself. Armin insists that he cannot hope to change anything if he is not willing to sacrifice something.

But he does not like talking about the cancer. He does not like talking about the doctors, the hospital, the drugs, their side effects, the transplant he is going to need, or anything of that sort. He does not need reminding. He dwells on these things enough when he is alone. When he’s with friends, he likes to focus on the things he _can_ do, the things that _are_ going right. Irrelevant topics are even better. Mikasa, Eren and Jean are willing to oblige for the sake of his sanity, but there is no doubt in his mind that they talk about his problems as soon as his back turns.

They hear Eren exclaim, “Aw, damn it!” He trots back into the family room with two popsicles, one he hands to his sister and the other to Jean.

“What’s up?” Mikasa asks.

“The A/C is off again,” he reports. He does not sit down.

The past week or so, the owners of the building have been periodically shutting off the central air conditioning system to save on electricity. Carla and Peter have already explained to their landlord that the system needs to stay on 24/7 in their units because a person in very tenuous health lives there, but they seem to keep forgetting.

Eren half-groans-half-sighs and makes his way into his bedroom. “Lemme go put on a shirt and yell at somebody.”

“At least the shirt part,” Armin mumbles; Jean hears this and chuckles.

“I’ll come with you,” Mikasa says.

Jean’s heard stories about Eren and Mikasa scrapping with other kids in the neighborhood when they were younger. Hotheaded Eren was usually the one who started the fights, but whenever he needed her, Mikasa was always the one to finish them. Armin never chose to participate – partly because he thought it was barbaric and partly because he was nowhere near as athletic as his best friends were – but sometimes he was targeted due to association. The three of them laugh, now that they’re older, at how reckless they used to be. (Although whatever maturation occurred hasn’t stopped Eren or Mikasa from being on the school’s wrestling team.)

Eren pulls on a baggy Fall Out Boy concert T-shirt as he takes long strides into and across the great room. “Ready to go?” he asks Mikasa. She nods and stands, taking her popsicle with her.

“Please be civil – don’t hit anybody,” Armin begs them on their way out. He knows he can’t ask them not to scare the living daylights out of the person.

“We’ll do our best,” Eren calls, and he closes the front door behind his sister.

“They’re gonna hit somebody,” Armin mutters. The commercial break ends. He rolls his head backward with a sigh.

Jean glances between him and the TV screen, and is hit with the fast, heavy realization that he and Armin are alone, only the two of them and no one else, for the first time since… well, since Armin revealed his financial situation to him over a month ago. So much has happened in that time.

He gulps down the dense knot in his chest. The heat in the apartment goes from merely present to stifling in a matter of seconds. He’s not sure whether he does not notice or is just trying to ignore Armin gazing at him – his eyes used to be so alert, shrewd, discerning, but lately they’re cloudy with fatigue. He clenches and unclenches his hand around the hem of his shorts.

“Are you okay?” Armin asks.

Jean jumps and forces a grin. “Yeah, just sweaty.” _Nice_. He sees his popsicle, still in its wrapper, that he set on the coffee table, and picks it up without seeming too conspicuous.

Armin returns a small, polite, doubtful smile. He bows his head and waits a beat.

“I’ve been thinking,” he finally starts.

Jean pulls the popsicle out of his mouth. He feels the sweat surge to his skin on his neck, his back. “What else is new?” he replies in a tone so flat in its calculation.

Armin chuckles once, still not meeting Jean’s eyes – instead, he angles his head toward the window in the next room. “You could be out there, swimming or hanging out with other friends” (other friends, what other friends? Jean could laugh from the inaccuracy) “or going on trips. You’re seventeen with a driver’s license and three months of free time. You could do anything.” He slowly faces Jean, meeting his eyes this time. “But you’ve been spending so much of your time here, sitting around with me.”

Jean swallows hard, able to taste a little melted popsicle.

“I want to thank you,” he says. “I am truly grateful for your company. You’ve been a good friend.”

For a moment, a tiny, _infinite_ moment Jean sees a flash of the Armin of old, the bright blue eyes of a computer science wiz who decided to sit next to him on project assignment day, having no idea what was happening inside his body. And he cannot breathe. He feels like a volcano in this moment, soaring and oppressively hot, a tumult inside him ready to explode or atrophy.

“I’m glad to have met you, Jean.”

A stinging sensation twinges the backs of his eyeballs. He forms a shaky smile that he can sense all the way down to his beating heart.

“I feel the same way,” he says quietly. Armin’s smile grows wider.

For once Jean is glad for the lack of air conditioning. It excuses the glowing redness he is sure is on his face.

Out of nowhere, Armin’s expression fades into one of something like fear – a sickly gray hue sucks the life out of his face, and exhaustion and pain crush him from above.

“But I have to ask,” he continues – Jean starts to scream internally –, “Why are you doing this?”

Jean inhales deeply and holds the air in his expanded chest, and looks over Armin’s whole body. The popsicle is melting fast. He’s melting.

“For you,” he blurts. He lets go of his breath, but not all of it leaves his lungs.

Armin forms another smile – a skeptical smirk, this one.

“Jean,” he says, “I’m flattered, really. But human beings are selfish creatures. Even when we perform selfless deeds, there is still a personal stake we claim. That’s our nature.”

His insides start to spiral downward. “Oh.”

Armin starts to tap the fingers of the hand he has set on the chair’s arm. “Obviously I won’t think any less of you, but I want to know what you are doing for yourself in all this.”

Jean feels a wave of sweat wash over him. He pushes his lips together to combat the thudding in his chest.

“Okay, then,” he says slowly. He furrows his eyebrows, lays his dying popsicle on its opened wrapper on the coffee table, leans a little forward and joins his hands in front of him. “Do you want me to give you my honest answer?” _An answer in terms that will satisfy you?_

“I’d prefer it,” Armin replies with a slight tilt of the head.

Jean wills himself to take another deep breath, blinks through the words in his mind, and clenches his hands tighter.

“I think I love you,” he says. He gasps silently at the tingle of the words on his lips, the sudden relief that lifts the weight off his shoulders and frees the tension in his muscles. He lets his words sink – into him and into Armin – for a second, blinks hard. Takes another breath. He pushes the rest of the words out of him: “I want you. I want you to be happy and healthy. I also want you in a different way, but happy and healthy first. I’m sticking around to make sure those two things happen.”

Armin’s expression does not change, and it makes Jean just about die inside. But his fingers pause mid-movement. His eyes stay locked on Jean for a very long minute, chewing over his statement with the kind of graceful keenness only he has, even when he is ill.

Jean’s muscles constrict all over again. He forces himself to lean back and separate his hands. _Lord, if that whole spontaneous combustion thing is the real deal, I wouldn’t mind some of that right now._

At last Armin sits up straight and chances a smile. “You know that’s not really the way I think, right?”

Jean does not feel his jaw drop open. He watches Armin’s smile curl larger and turn into the start of a laugh.

“What?”

Armin just laughs a little louder. He claps his hands together. “I knew you were attracted to me. I knew it!”

Jean shifts forward, a huge frown now crossing his face. _Never, in a million years…_

“Well, shit! Then why’d you have to mess with me like that?” he barks indignantly.

He sighs out of the laugh but keeps his grin. “Because I didn’t feel comfortable coming out first?” he answers.

Jean’s mouth snaps shut, and he blinks disbelievingly at him. His heart, now probably somewhere in his foot, doesn’t know whether to beat even faster or just stop entirely.

Armin’s cheeks tinge with light pink. He glances away. “I. I wanted to ensure a yes, I guess.” He shrugs with one shoulder and meets Jean’s gaze again.

A new kind of heat spreads through Jean, starting from the pit of his stomach. A comfortable kind of heat. He starts to shake his head, and can’t feel it, can’t stop. He has to think to breathe. At length, he cautions a smile.

Distantly, the air conditioner begins to run again.

Armin sets his elbow on the arm of the chair and rests his chin in his palm. “I’ve actually never been in this kind of relationship with a person before,” he admits.

Jean’s mouth twitches as he lets out a single chuckle. He wrings his hands in his lap until his knuckles go white. The tenseness drains from him all at once.

“Neither have I,” he breathes. 


	6. Jealousy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so sorry this is late. things came up and i hit a little bit of a wall and. i'm just glad this chapter is done. 
> 
> this fic has been so self-indulgent to write -- a pleasure despite some of the hassles, and if i were not as nice or had more time i would have made it a great deal more tragic, more intricate and more meaningful. maybe i'll rewrite it someday. 
> 
> her royal highness tumblr user ascensionablaze beta-read. today's -- er, yesterday's prompt was "jealousy". thank you all for your patience and your feedback! i appreciate it so much. the final chapter can be expected tomorrow -- or later tonight, if i decide to procrastinate even more on schoolwork.

“You can be the moon and still be jealous of the stars.” _Gary Allan_

***

Jean Kirchstein can hardly contain his excitement, sitting beside Mr. Bodt at the airport, waiting for the gate to open.

Mr. Bodt stands and approaches the gate the second he sees people coming, and receives his twin daughters Fiona and Isabel first, sons Marco and Nolan not far behind. Marco meets eyes with Jean over his father’s shoulder, and the two of them immediately smile and Jean stands and they do their level best to not rush at each other. They hold each other in a long-awaited hug.

“Oh, my God,” Jean mumbles, “I have missed you so much.” He can hardly believe Marco is tangible now – in three short months he’s almost forgotten Marco can have a presence.

“I have too,” Marco replies. He squeezes his friend a little tighter and lets go.

They stand close for no more than two seconds before they just have to grab one another again.

After parting ways with his siblings, Marco follows Jean to his car in the cell phone lot. Jean takes his suitcases and piles them into the backseat without saying anything. Marco frowns down at the damage to the trunk. “Aw! What happened to your car?” he asks.

“I, uh, kind of got into an accident,” Jean answers. He shuts the back door. “It’s not a big deal. I’m taking an online defensive driving course to have my ticket dismissed.” The course is a pain in the ass, actually, but a small pain.

“Huh.” Marco walks around the side of the car and sits in the front passenger’s seat. Jean takes the wheel. “I’m sorry about that.”

Jean scoffs. “It’s not your fault.” He turns the keys in the ignition. “I’ve actually been lobbying my parents to get it repaired for Christmas.” He – carefully – pulls out of the lot and onto the main road.

“I still can’t get over your hair,” Marco comments. Jean runs a hand over his peach-fuzzy scalp as if he forgot what he did to it, and chuckles.

“So how are things up in New York?” he asks.

Jean has found that, now that they’re apart, Marco talks about his own life much more than he did when they lived only a few blocks away from one another. He knows about his girlfriend – Marco shot a candid video of her at one point with his phone, and Jean got to see it and hear her rather glamorous NYC accent. He knows the ROTC at Marco’s new school is huge, and that Marco made a new friend there, Marlo (Jean already pointed out the funniness of their names). He knows Marco has assumed the position of “man of the house”, and all the stress that comes with it, now that his father is out of the picture and mother is working nonstop. He knows Marco is teaching swim lessons at the YMCA over this summer – at least, during the times he’s actually in Buffalo.

He knows a lot, but he hasn’t said much about himself. Every time the conversation turns toward what he’s up to he just talks about the fundraising campaign, as if he’s obsessed. All Marco knows is that he’s raised a remarkable amount of money so far. For some reason, he feels guilty for not being so open.

“Things are all right,” Marco says. “We took the twins to a psychiatrist at the beginning of the summer. Isabel has ADD and Fiona has ADHD and Asperger’s; they’re taking medication for that now, still getting used to it.”

“Wow,” Jean says quietly.

Marco smiles and turns his head toward him. “But I wanna know about you. How’s your life been here?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Jean replies. The two of them have plans to spend time together every day this July, as it is. Mr. Bodt agreed to let his oldest child do whatever he wants during his court-mandated month here.

“Have you made any new friends?” Marco presses on.

A hard lump forms at the base of Jean’s throat. He brakes for a red light, and throws a confused glance at Marco when the car stops.

“You can be honest,” Marco says. “Not that we’re not still friends, but I think it’s good to move on somehow. I won’t be offended in the least if you say you have new friends.”

Jean lets go of the breath he wasn’t quite aware he was holding. “I do, actually,” he replies. The light turns green. He consciously fixes his hands at 10-and-2 on the steering wheel as he eases up on the brake. “I, uh, have a boyfriend, too.”

Marco blinks several times to contain his – surprise? excitement? sudden discomfort? _shit, did I say the wrong thing just now?_ – Jean discreetly turns up the air conditioning. “Really?”

Jean nods with a bit of hesitation.

“Congrats!” Marco grins and nudges him in the shoulder with his hand, and Jean smiles too now out of relief. “Who is it? Is it anyone I know?”

“Yeah, uh.” Jean feels a chilled sweat sneak up on him. “Armin – Arlert.”

Marco raises his eyebrows. “Oh, really?” He leans back. “That is awesome! Good for you guys.” There is a genuine giddiness in his voice that warms Jean’s heart, and he squirms a bit in his seat.

“Thanks,” Jean mumbles.

He asks more questions. Jean and Armin have been going out for a little under three weeks, and it’s been pretty great, no problems. Of course, he uses the term “going out” loosely, as they haven’t actually met anywhere outside the apartments, and the most they’ve done together so far is hold hands (which was needlessly thrilling the first time, especially considering that Armin often holds hands with his platonic friends too because he loves the sensation of it). Eren, Mikasa and Peter have no problem with their relationship. Jean hasn’t had the occasion to tell his parents yet, though. And Armin is on the mend, contrary to what one might think with his severe chemo side effects: if all continues to go well he should be in remission by September, which seems at once forever and only a day away.

Jean hopes to reveal his fundraising efforts to Armin the day after Independence Day. He doesn’t tell Marco that he’s fantasized about the moment more times than he can count since May.

Marco chuckles. “You know, if you and Armin were celebrities, your couple name would be something like Jearmin,” he says.

“If you and your girlfriend were celebrities, you’d be Joharco,” Jean quips, and the two of them sputter into laughter.

***

Armin cannot seem to stop shaking his head, his hands knitted over his mouth and tears materializing in his eyes. “This is too much,” he says. “Jean, this is too much.”

His heart drops into his stomach. “What do you mean?” he asks, tensing.

Armin’s wide blue eyes shoot him a desperate glance, and then turn downward at the check placed in front of him. He lowers his hands from his face.

“Sixty-two thousand, five hundred seventy-six dollars,” he reads. He shakes his head more vigorously and stops, and looks back at Jean. “I don’t deserve a penny of this – I can’t accept it.”

“What are you talking about?” Jean says. “You deserve all of it.”

“Where did you even get this?” he asks.

Jean shrugs one shoulder. “Part of it was donated, and part of it Marco and I earned selling our computer skills.”

Armin stares in alarm at Marco, who smiles and says, “Don’t look at me – it was all Jean’s great idea.”

“You had told me how you and your grandpa wouldn’t have enough money for all the treatments you need,” Jean explains. “I couldn’t just sit back and let you go broke. We already gave your grandpa the first thirty, and there is still more money coming.”

Armin turns toward his grandfather with his shoulders hunched. “You knew about this?” he breathes.

Peter nods. “All of us did.”

Armin glances at Eren and Mikasa, who sit on the other side of Mr. Arlert, trying to keep their expressions as innocent as possible. He picks up the check and waves it up and down. “First thirty – you mean this isn’t all of it?” His eyebrows furrow a bit.

This time Peter shakes his head. “It’s already spent,” he says. “I bought you health insurance with it.”

Armin drops the check onto the Arlert kitchen table, his chest dipping as he exhales. He starts to shake his head again, gradually picking up speed, and at length looks toward Jean again. “Jean, this is too much.”

Jean lets out a breathy, careful chuckle.

“I—” Armin’s eyes overflow with tears. His shoulders and lips quiver. “Thank you.” He buries his whole face in his hands. A sob squeaks out of him.

Without a second of hesitation, Jean reaches forward and holds him tight. He hears the clatter of many chairs moving and within seconds everyone else piles on top of the two of them in a mess of arms and warmth and tears.

Some cosmic force eventually rifts them all apart. Armin sniffles and emits a weak laugh. Jean brushes his fingertips over the side of Armin’s head, where his long blond hair used to be, leans in and flutters his eyelashes shut against his cheek.

“You are amazing, okay?” Jean whispers. He lowers his hand and runs it along the crook between Armin’s neck and shoulder. “You are so amazing.”

Jean leans back into his chair, tenderly pulling away his hand from his shoulder. Armin hiccups once, and presses the side of his fist to his mouth. He turns, looks up and scans his eyes over everyone, and shrinks in his seat.

“I don’t – I don’t even know how I can repay any of you,” he confesses.

“Are you kidding?” Eren bends down a bit, almost to Armin’s eye-level. “All this was the least anyone could do for you.”

Armin blinks at him several times in wet confusion.

Eren sticks up an index finger. “First grade. Our elementary school caught on fire while I was in the bathroom. I had no idea what to do and the teacher had forgotten about me. You split off from the rest of the class to come find me and lead me outside. Fuckin’ first grade and you were already doing that shit.” He holds up a second finger. “That one time we went to summer camp, and the two of us got lost and it was getting dark. Not only did you get us back to camp safely, but when we ran into those bear cubs, you knew exactly how to get away from them without getting hurt.” A third finger. “The first time I had one of my panic attacks, you were the only one who knew how to calm me down or what was even happening. You’re almost always the one to calm me down. And when my mental problems were at their worst, you _always_ defended me, and you listened and knew what was going on in my head and helped me more than anybody else did.” Fourth, fifth, seventh, tenth – wiggling fingers. “Not to mention all the times you gave me first-aid after I had bad fights. Even when I had a concussion.”

Armin’s voice is quiet, “You would have done the same for me, given the chance—”

“But that’s not the point!” Eren smacks his hand on his open palm with each syllable. “You have literally saved my life, so many times I can’t even count!” He stands back and gestures at the others with him. “Not to mention everything you have done for these people, too.”

“I know you were the one who called the police about that man who molested me,” Mikasa adds right away. “I had never mentioned it to you or to anyone before, but you recognized that something was wrong and got him taken away and arrested without even being asked.”

Peter chimes in: “And do you remember when I had that heart attack? You were going through chemo for the first time, then, so you were already weak. But you gave me CPR until the ambulance came.”

“Yeah, all that and more,” Eren exclaims. He flings an arm in Jean and Marco’s direction. “We weren’t even the ones who organized this whole thing. It was those two. Frankly, Armin, none of us knows how we can repay _you_.”

Jean gulps and shudders. His stomach churns, and he steals a glance at Marco, who looks to be in some kind of shock.

Armin sniffles, chuckles once, and wipes away a tear with his wrist.

***

There are four locks on the Arlerts’ front door, and Jean stands before it listening to all those locks come undone. He sticks his hands in his pockets, and tries and fails to gulp down the dense feeling in his throat.

The door opens. Armin is in his glasses, and wears a plain white T-shirt that practically eats his small frame whole. “Hey,” he says, slipping his cell phone into the back pocket of his sweatpants.

Jean lifts his head just a bit, and pulls out a hand to lay on the doorframe. “Hey.” His voice cracks.

“So, Marco’s eating dinner with his family tonight, eh?” An odd expression comes over Armin’s face that Jean isn’t quite able to read.

“Yeah,” he answers, nodding. Then he realizes how bad that sounded. He clenches his arm muscles to force back the light shudder down his spine. He quickly follows up with: “I’m sorry I haven’t seen you as much since he came to town.”

Armin waves a hand. “Don’t apologize; it’s fine. I would do the same if Eren or Mikasa moved away and came back to visit.” His features scrunch for a split-second and he takes a step back and opens the door further. Jean takes the hint and steps inside.

While the furniture in the Arlert apartment is rather modest, there are more than enough trinkets lying around to make up for the simplicity. Densely packed bookshelves line whole walls. Antiques, novelties and rare collector’s items claim nearly every free surface. The place is like a museum, dustless and unmoving – whenever Jean enters he feels as if he is not allowed to touch anything.

Armin leads Jean straight into his bedroom, the only room in the apartment where Jean feels he can sit down safely. It is furnished and decorated mostly plainly and generically, but little bits of Armin’s personality still show: pictures of friends, a poster featuring a chemistry pun, all the cards he’s received during his stays at the cancer ward, magnets dotting a dry-erase board that’s been dry-erased a few too many times, and an intricately decorated saltwater fish tank with seven or eight different creatures inside it. There is a closet, but it is entirely full of books and keepsakes – he stores his clothes in the old dresser at the foot of his bed.

Jean takes the desk chair while Armin takes the bed. Armin starts talking first. “I feel like I didn’t show my gratitude to you enough yesterday,” he admits. “You were the one responsible, after all.”

“It’s no big deal,” Jean says.

“But it is a big deal. You covered my entire treatment.” He joins his hands together in his lap. “That’s not something to take lightly.”

Jean shrugs and squirms, and rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. He lets the silence settle for a beat, glancing at the corners where wall and floor meet.

“Thank you,” Armin spills.

“I just wanted to tell you that, even though you haven’t had the opportunity to prevent bears from attacking me or give me CPR or call nine-one-one on someone who molested me or do anything else like that, you’ve still made a huge impact on my life,” Jean says. His leg starts to move up and down. “Like, huge.” He crosses his arms over his chest.

Something like a smile touches the corners of Armin’s mouth. “I – I would hope I have,” he says, burying his hands between his thighs, “Considering what you’ve given me in return. I don’t want to have received more than I gave.”

“Believe me, you gave.” Jean forces his leg to stop fidgeting. “You may not have noticed, but you’ve helped me change, Armin. I used to be so lazy and self-absorbed. I never did anything. You led me to find a purpose in life – that was something I was really lacking before, and now that I have it I—.” The rest of the words die on his tongue, succumbed to the staticky burning in his chest.

Armin regards him a minute, setting his jaw. “But, Jean, that was all you. You are the one who let yourself change. I had nothing to do with it.”

“No, you had everything to do with it,” Jean says. He leans forward and a great wave of heat pulsates through him. He looks Armin squarely through the glasses.

“Without your influence I never would have gotten off my ass to do anything special. Do you want to know why I did what I did for you? Huh?” He unfolds an arm to point at him, and then the other to gesticulate. “Because that night at the hotel in the capital, I realized I had no passion for anything – anything whatsoever. I listened to you talk about writing and World War Two and the goddamn _ocean_ for hours, and all I had to talk about was my boring-as-shit life. You have done so much with your seventeen years that, honestly, you’ve earned your cancer treatment a hundred times over. When I turned seventeen that day I had nothing to show for it but a single friend and a transcript full of classes I couldn’t have cared less about. I hadn’t done shit for anybody, and I can’t believe I used to be proud of that.” His voice is starting to waver now, his arm movements wilder. “You have ALL and everyone’s whole world is turned upside-down because of it. If the sick person had been me instead of you, nothing would have fucking happened. I had nothing to live for anyway!” He stares intensely at Armin as he tries to catch his breath and calm his voice, his chest pounding and floundering, his face red. “And then I met you. And you’re my ocean, Armin. You’re the topic I could talk endlessly about. You’re the thought that’s always crossing my mind. It kills me sometimes because you don’t understand how important you are. To me or to everyone else in your life.”

A cold catharsis rushes over him in that moment, draining all the energy out of his body. He relaxes into the chair, closes his mouth, and bends over to hang his head low.

“There,” he murmurs, “That’s my fire-in-the-first-grade-bathroom story.” He heaves a sigh. His heart has jumped to his throat now.

Armin is dead silent for what feels like hours, the motor that runs the fish tank filter providing the only noise in the room.

He sighs again. “You don’t have to respond if you don’t want to – I just wanted to get that out there,” he says, and he sits up and scans Armin’s pale face.

“Jean.” Armin eases into a smile, stands from the bed, and shuffles across the room to the desk chair. He stops just in front of him and leans down to Jean’s level. He comes forward, and Jean erupts into a sweat and squeezes his eyes shut. His ear tingles with the sensation of Armin’s lips close to them.

“I am so glad I could help you,” Armin whispers, draping one arm around the back of Jean’s shoulders. “You have done more than I can say for me, and I appreciate that so much. You really are special, Jean Kirchstein. You hold a key place in not just my heart, but everyone else’s, too.” His head turns slightly to press his lips to the skin of Jean’s cheek, which makes Jean blow air hard out of his mouth and try to not tremble. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

As he starts to pull away he sees the frown crossing Jean’s face, and stops himself only a foot or so from him. “What?” His voice is gentle, almost back to its honeyed normal.

“Why don’t you ever kiss me on the lips?” Jean asks.

Armin starts a bit, turns away and rubs the back of his neck. “I, uh, am afraid I’ll taste bad,” he confesses. “I still have a lot of problems with nausea, and, you know, the consequences of that.” He half-shrugs.

“But don’t you brush your teeth immediately after every time?” Jean says. He feels a tight pain around the knob at the base of his neck, the thought occurring to him that an experience as awful as _throwing up_ is now a norm for his boyfriend.

“Well, yeah, but that’s just for getting the acid off the enamel,” he says. “Doesn’t help the breath.”

One fun thing about dating a science geek like Armin Arlert is the mental imagery he provides. Stomach acid wearing away tooth enamel. So sexy. (Jean’s no better, though. The most recent time he tried to flirt with Armin he stuttered and jumbled his words, and the joke went over Armin’s head in favor of correcting his grammar, and it was just a big mess.) Life sure is full of gross things.

Jean spreads his arms. “I don’t think I’d mind.”

“Oh, trust me, you would mind,” Armin says with a tilt of the head.

He and Jean meet eyes – and they stay on one another for a long moment, breaths hitching in their throats at the electricity in the air between them.

“What if you brush your teeth again?” Jean suggests.

Armin shakes his head. “That’s not gonna do it.”

“Chew gum?”

“Takes a lot more than that,” Armin replies.

Jean claps his hands together and points his joined fingers at him. “What about mouthwash?”

“Have you vomited lately?” Armin says. “It is really, really nasty, and the taste stays there for a long time afterward.”

“I don’t care about that at all,” Jean says, “And I’m starting to think you’re refusing to kiss me for a different reason than just self-consciousness.”

“Well, yeah, I am.” Armin lifts and drops his arms. “I don’t want to subject you to that, especially since you’ve probably never kissed anybody before as far as I can deduce, and if I have to be your first then I don’t want it to be unpleasant for you.”

Jean furrows his eyebrows. “Christ,” he scoffs. He grips Armin’s shoulders, pulls him forward and locks lips with him.

The kiss is rather chaste, noses pressing together, mouths warm and smooth against each other. Jean does not fully comprehend what he has just done until he has to think to breathe, and all at once his heart rate skyrockets, and a warm, electrifying buzz shoots straight from his lips down his neck to his stomach. Armin squirms a little in his grasp.

They come apart, eyes sliding open to pierce into one another at close proximity. Armin blinks the shock out of his expression. Jean scowls.

“You do taste like vomit,” he says quietly.

“See? I told you.” Armin raises his eyebrows and angles his head downward just slightly to develop a stern expression, looking over the top of his eyeglass frames.

Jean nods, and brings his gaze to the empty space over Armin’s shoulder, chewing over the tingle in his mouth. At length he returns his attention to the boy he is holding. “I still don’t really care, though,” he says, and he cups one hand over the corner of Armin’s jaw and kisses him again. 

***

Two weeks later Armin awakes in the hospital with no idea what has happened, being so weak and anemic that he nearly died. The doctors cannot lower his extreme dosage, but the side effects are truly starting to take their toll. Armin hardly goes anywhere but the cancer ward, his home and the Jaeger home after that; he doesn’t come to school when classes start in the fall. Thankfully, he is able to earn the remainder of his necessary high school credits through online correspondence.

Jean forms a routine. On weekdays he goes with Eren and Mikasa straight from school to wherever Armin is and spends the afternoon with the three of them – talking, laughing, doing homework, watching _Dance Moms_ and documentaries and pro wrestling. On weekends he hangs out the whole day and even spends nights when he can.

Of course, some days are better than others. Some days Armin feels healthy enough to join his friends on a spontaneous trip to Wal-Mart. Some days he cannot even get out of bed. It all depends, and everyone just has to adapt.

Jean holds Armin’s hand – bony fingers, brittle nails, smooth palms – and kisses and cuddles and does everything. Once in a while Armin gets into a mood wherein he wants Jean to read to him, and so Jean reads and reads and Armin eventually falls asleep with his head on his shoulder or in his lap and Jean just keeps reading.

He remembers one Saturday when he, Eren, Annie, Mikasa and Armin tried to stay up all night, on video call the entire time with Marco, Marlo and Johanna. Everybody giggled and babbled beyond coherence about anything from deep philosophy to pedantic and hilarious and obscene-sounding words (which started when Armin came out of the kitchen and said he couldn’t respond to some questions the others had yelled at him because he was “masticating”, and Eren and Jean at first mistook it for him saying “masturbating”, and when they asked why he didn’t just say “chewing” he said it was because that word wasn’t pretentious enough, and everyone laughed). Armin passed out around 2 a.m., though, and almost everyone else followed – Annie and Johanna were the only ones who managed to stay awake until dawn. It was universally agreed on then that this was at once a brilliant and terrible idea.

In October doctors start to look for a bone marrow donor. Between Armin’s marrow being faulty as it is and the way the chemotherapy has ravaged his body, he needs the transplant as soon as he can get it. Eren, as it turns out, matches perfectly as a candidate for donation. When he hears this news and is asked if he will go through with it, he looks almost offended and says, “Of course,” without hesitating or even knowing exactly what the procedure entails.

***

Together they take up a decent fraction of the seats in the waiting room. The air is thick and warm between them.

Armin has a death grip on Jean’s hand, and he gazes into space and mumbles a stream of nervous, sentimental nothings to Eren until Eren just takes and squeezes his other hand. Then he grabs Annie too and Annie grabs Carla, and Jean grabs Mikasa and Mikasa grabs Peter, and the seven of them now sit silent in a row with their hands joined and they swear their heartbeats synchronize.

If this transplant is successful, it’s all but a guarantee that Armin’s leukemia will never recur again.

No one speaks for a long while, until Peter leaves his chair, kneels before Eren, and places a hand on his knee. “I cannot thank you enough for this,” he says.

“Mister Arlert,” Eren says, “You don’t have to.” He takes Peter’s hand off his knee. “Anything to help Armin.” Peter’s face splits into a wrinkly smile.

Carla appears beside the old man. She ducks low to throw her arms around her son. “I am so proud of you,” she says. She squeezes him. As soon as she pulls away, Annie leans on him, nuzzling her head into the crook of his neck with affection.

He chuckles a little. “Guys, it’s not like they’re taking anything out of me that I need to live. It’s super simple, what they’re gonna do.” _Harvest the marrow from the hipbones, filter it, and deliver it to the recipient via transfusion, right?_

“Not so many people are as noble as you are,” Annie says. Seems to be the prevailing attitude amongst Eren’s loved ones, but he sees his situation as a no-brainer. She sits up, and the two of them look each other in the eyes and share a noiseless kiss.

Mikasa brushes past Peter and Carla, stands in front of Eren and Armin, leans down and throws an arm around each of them. She lowers her head between theirs. Eren lays his outer arm over Mikasa’s back and holds Armin with the other; Armin does the same with her and Eren. The three of them close their eyes and melt into the embrace.

After a few minutes, she sighs and says, “My boys,” in a fond, broken voice so quiet Jean can barely hear it from the seat beside Armin’s. “I love you both so much, you know that?” she whispers. “You’re my brothers. I would do anything for you.”

“Likewise,” Armin murmurs. She hums, draws back, takes one mournful look at each of them and kisses them on their foreheads.

A nurse appears in the doorway. “Eren Jaeger,” she calls.

Mikasa steps away, and Eren glances at everyone. “Well, that’s me,” he says, standing. “It’s time.”

“Love you, sweetheart,” Carla says, and Eren replies with “love you too, Mom.”

Armin watches him desperately as he moves further away. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks.

Eren stops and turns toward his best friend.

“Are you kidding?” he says. “I’m about to be put to sleep to have holes drilled into my butt. This is gonna be the best surgery ever!” He flashes a grin, waves at everyone once, and heads to the operating room with the nurse.

The moment he’s out of sight, Jean turns toward Annie and asks, “What do you see in him?” in a half-joking tone.

“The thing that attracted me to him initially was that he’s so fiercely idealistic,” she answers.

“It’s true,” Carla replies. “My son’s always been a romantic.”

“But I think what made us get together and stay together is that we’ve learned from each other,” Annie finishes. She smooths the hem of her hoodie. “That’s the most important thing, that we’ve taught each other so much.”

Jean thinks on this a moment. If love is mutual teaching, then he and Armin definitely share it – at least, that is what he hopes. He has certainly learned a lot. He smiles a little smile, and feels warm all over.

Armin strains to stand by himself, and Peter meets him with his wheelchair. “I have to get back to the ward now,” Armin says. He asks Mikasa to let him know when the operation is over and Eren wakes up. Jean comes forward and the two of them peck each other on the corners of their mouths. Then Peter wheels him away.

Jean and the three women slink back to their seats. Now all they have to do is wait.

A few minutes later he receives a text in French from his mother, asking when he’s going to be home. He replies, _Not any time soon._ He steals a glance at the three of them. Carla frets in constant motion in the furthest chair. Annie tucks her long bangs behind her ear, her nose buried in a Jane Austen novel. Mikasa is on her phone.

He glances at her screen. She seems to be on some website, scrolling through pictures and blocks of text.

“What’cha doing?” he asks.

“Oh, I’m just reading Armin’s blog,” she replies.

That’s right – he did mention once that he runs a blog. Jean hums and clicks his tongue, his eyes wandering.

“I can give you the link if you want,” she says in a smug, flat voice, as if she can read his mind.

He blinks repeatedly and acts surprised. “Would you?”

“Give him any indication that I told you and I’ll take a bat to the part of your car that isn’t smashed,” she threatens. He half-smiles and hands her his phone. She types in the web address, her long black-painted nails clacking on the screen protector.

She leans in as she returns it to him. “If you’re wondering, he does talk about you on there,” she whispers. “All the posts that have to do with you are tagged ‘boy’.”

His heart thuds particularly hard once in the center of his chest. “Thanks,” he says.

Posts are organized from latest to earliest. At the top of the page, the most recent one made – from just a few hours ago – says _i feel so blessed. i have the best friends in the world._ Jean smiles.

Judging from what Jean skims, his blog is rather popular, and consists of a variety of topics, from meta on social issues to book reviews to random scientific facts to pretty pictures and music to occasional fandom junk. He can be just as eloquent online as he is in real life, which is no surprise. After going through the first twenty or so pages, Jean quits biting back his vain urges and searches for the “boy” tag, and reads the posts there. He squirms and presses his hand over his mouth and blushes furiously, trying his level best to be cool, and has to stop every couple minutes to compose himself and make sure his innards don’t rip through his skin and soar away. Mikasa notices and chuckles.

With this, he discovers two important things:

First, Armin has liked him for a long time. A very long time. Crushed on Jean from afar since pretty much the first week of junior year. _wow am i just the gayest human being on this planet for this guy or – good god i hope he doesn’t notice ugh i am so embarrassing. having a crush is so hard_

Second, he was so stupid for _ever_ doubting that Armin thinks about him. Armin’s Jean-related ramblings aren’t quite as articulate as his debates or ocean spiels, but they contain just as much emotion if not more. The kid has seemed like such a smooth operator for most of the time Jean’s known him. Only recently has Jean realized how dorky Armin really is, and it’s cute all the same. This, though, is on an entirely different, exponentially cuter level.

_boy hugged me today! boy hugged me! boy hugaklhgdlfjadsf_

_i want to kiss him so, so bad but i taste like puke he’ll probably hate me_

And, Jean’s favorite, _he said i’m his ocean. i’m his_ ocean _. i can die happy now, i think._

He’s not going to die any time soon, though. When the nurse finally returns, she tells everyone that the procedure went completely by the book, and everybody – everybody is going to be just fine. 


	7. Winter Fun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here we are. the ending. it is short and sweet -- hope that's not disappointing. the final prompt was "winter fun", so i had to do a bit of a timeskip since most of the fic takes place in spring/summer. 
> 
> thank you all for reading! it means so much. 
> 
> tumblr user ascensionablaze did a phenomenal job beta-reading -- as always C:

 “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?” _John Steinbeck_

***

Jean Kirchstein just felt something hit him in the back.

He turns on his heels and glares at his friends. Eren has his hands behind his back and aims an innocent expression at the sky.

“Jaeger, did you just chuck a snowball at me?” he asks, eyebrows furrowing.

“It was Mikasa,” Eren says.

Jean deadpans. “If Mikasa had thrown it, it would have gone straight through me.” He’s had a snowball fight with them once before – he would know. He still has bruises. That girl throws _hard_.

She elbows her brother in the side. When they come closer, Jean squints at him. “I see the fuckin’ snow on your gloves, Jaeger.”

“Can you two please be civil with each other for once?” Armin begs.

“Motion seconded,” Annie mumbles in addition.

Eren laughs. “Yeah, yeah, sorry.”

Jean holds open the door for Annie and Mikasa, and they thank him for it on their way inside.

Armin stands in front of him, and the two of them exchange a quick kiss. “How are you?” he asks.

Eren passes behind him – he and Jean meet eyes for a split second, Jean with a look of _I’ll get back at you later for this_ , and Eren with a look of _I’ll be waiting_.

“I’m pretty good,” Jean replies with a shrug. “The real question is, how are you?”

Armin smiles a small smile and swings his arms back and forth a bit. “I feel really well, actually,” he says. “Better than I have in a long, long time.”

“That’s great,” Jean says, exhaling into a matching smile. He ushers Armin inside, and the two of them meet at the booth Eren, Mikasa and Annie have already grabbed.

Their waiter is Bertholdt, a tall guy who talks quickly, and who happens to be friends with Annie’s cousin Reiner. Annie and Armin order green tea, Jean and Eren ask for coffee, and everyone decides to split a basket of French fries as an appetizer.

Without trying to seem obvious, Jean slides his arm around Armin’s upper back.

“You know, there are three new species of sharks that are really close to getting put on the ‘endangered’ list,” Armin starts, angling his head up at him.

Jean faces him now. “Seriously? That sucks.”

“Doesn’t it?” The energy level in Armin’s voice jumps. He begins to gesticulate. “Such a huge disappointment. One of them, the tiger shark, it was clearly from fishing. People had started to use it for shark fin soup.”

Jean could listen to him talk like this for hours, if he could.

“Isn’t shark fin soup just an aesthetic?” Eren cuts in. “Like, the fins serve no purpose. They don’t even add flavor.”

“That’s exactly right,” Armin says, pointing his face and a finger in his direction. “It is the most horrible thing ever. Fishing boats catch the sharks, chop off their fins, and then drop them back into the water and leave them for dead, immobile and bleeding.”

“What assholes,” Eren says with a scowl.

Bertholdt comes with the coffee, tea and fries. He scurries over to the next table. Mikasa dumps salt onto the basket and starts to eat out of it two fries at a time. Eren takes a handful.

Jean stares mesmerized at the steam pouring off his drink as the topic changes. Armin’s chemotherapy is still not over. It’s not going to be over for another year or two. But there is a different feeling to it now, a certainty that Armin is going to beat this cancer once and for all. That the ocean is not going to just boil away. Lately everyone has felt this ease, and life is looking up. Jean no longer carries the heavy, dense worry in his heart.

He glances out the frosty window and counts cars in the parking lot by the number of snowy roofs. His lips twitch a bit. He picks up the mug by the handle, inspects the rim, lifts the mug to his mouth and drinks. The coffee is scalding hot – it burns his throat on the way down, but he just keeps drinking until half of it is gone. Warmth pours into his chest. He sets down the mug with a final gulp. And the second everyone else stops speaking, he opens his mouth and says, “Armin, you still haven’t been to the ocean, have you?”

He feels Armin inhale deeply as they meet eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he says. He chuckles a little and turns toward his friends, about to start talking to them again.

“Well, why don’t we just go?”

Armin returns to Jean and cocks one eyebrow. “What?”

“We can just go,” Jean says, tensing his shoulders. “I mean, it’s at least a thirteen-hour drive from here to the nearest coast, but we have time – the semester’s not starting for more than a week. Why not?”

He has a car. Armin doesn’t have a license yet, but no one has to know, and he’s not a bad driver – he’s taken driver’s ed. They can take turns napping, and down one energy drink after another. They can spend the night at a cheap motel in some coastal town and drive back later the next day.

If they go fast they can make it there by New Year’s Eve, Jean does the math in his head. They can run along the snowless ground, sit in the sand, breathe in the temperate air, dip their toes in the water. They can watch fireworks on the beach and kiss at midnight. The very thought of it makes his heart flip in his chest.

“You’re serious?” Armin asks. His mouth can’t close.

Jean nods. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s go – that is, if you’re feeling up to it. If you think you can handle the trip, health-wise.”

Armin stares dumbfounded at him for a moment, wills himself to breathe, blinks hard a few times, and throws questioning glances at all of his friends.

“Dude, you should go,” Eren says. “If you feel well enough for it, you should go.”

“Go,” Mikasa says with a smile. Annie nods.

Armin turns back to Jean. His wide eyes scan him up and down, seeking some indication that this is all a dream. It is not.

“Okay.” A grin grows on his face, and he starts to nod more and more vigorously. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it. Let’s go to the ocean.”

Jean grins back. He lifts his arm from around Armin, who stands from the booth first. Jean downs the rest of his coffee and then takes out his wallet, but Eren waves a hand and shakes his head at him. He pockets the wallet, and holds Armin’s hand all the way out the diner to his car. As soon as Armin sits in the front passenger’s seat he laughs as if he still cannot believe they are doing this. Jean turns the keys in the ignition and backs carefully out of the parking spot, and off they go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> road trip! 
> 
> why do my multi-chapter fics always end with the main couple leaving?

**Author's Note:**

> [edit]: thank you all so very much for the lovely comments, kudos, bookmarks and positive feedback. y'all are so supportive. it really means a lot.


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